Centralized configuration controls solution(s) for CentOS?

[ByersW]

I've been working on a controls package to configure CentOS devices according to company requirements/policy.

Being able to centralize the distribution and maintenance of these controls (cloud solution or otherwise) would be hugely beneficial as these machines are not guaranteed to be in the same building (or state for that matter).

Does CentOS offer any functionality that would help accomplish this? If not, what has been found to be the best fit for centrally managing CentOS systems?

(First-time poster, my apologies for any forum faux pas )

[jlehtone]

There are several configuration management systems. For example: Ansible, Chef, Puppet, and Salt.

Red Hat has documentation and "system roles" for Ansible. They have "Ansible Tower" (?) solution too,
but one can use Ansible without that.

I've installed Ansible (on CentOS 7 "control machine") with:

Code: Select all

yum install centos-release-ansible-29
yum install ansible

When one runs ansible (ansible-playbook), it connects to remote machines with ssh and applies configuration as expressed in "inventory" and "playbook".

Alternatively, one could install Ansible to managed devices and have them run "ansible-pull" regularly. The "pull" retrieves inventory and play from a (git) repository and applies to localhost.

[TrevorH]

I use puppet to do this sort of thing. I think Red Hat still have their Satellite product though it's now a bunch of other projects all packaged up together.