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Channel: Comments on: Configuration management: push vs. pull
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By: Mark Burgess

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There are certainly unscalable aspects of push and pull, but in fact they have different optimizations. Push is easier on the server, since it can more easily manage its resource caching, but it is highly unpredictable as you don’t know whether the clients are available or not. Moreover, a server is usually equipped to deal with the load where as a client isn’t. With push you are letting one system drive the availability of many, which makes adaptation and fault tolerance very difficult. Pull can automatically perform distributed load balancing and each machine can download stuff at its convenience. This especially applies to hosts that are down at the moment of push.

Another problem with push is that the clients have no say in what they get from the “pusher”. This is a potential security disaster waiting to happen. Clients are in a better position to decide when and what to download than a central pusher is to decide when and what they need from its single viewpoint. So adaptive behaviour makes a strong case for pull based (subscription based) services.

As for the rest, Cfengine introduced pull and is of course far superior to Puppet both in capabilities and implementation ;-)


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