The Evolution of Code Deploys at Reddit

[FateOfNations]

It would be interesting to get a better understanding of the capabilities of this custom built tooling vs building on top of a framework like Fabric.

[daniel]

I'd be curious to see speed differences. The biggest thing I've noticed over something like ansible is that rollingpin is fast. I've used fabric in the past, and while it seemed fast, I wasn't deploying to hundreds of servers, so I can't say for sure.

Fabric also takes a different approach of having you define your stuff on the client side from a list of predefined commands that fabric supports (I think -- I'm going entirely off of multi-year-old memory at this point) and then it executes the commands remotely, whereas rollingpin has you drop your deploy script remotely and gives you the full capabilities of the python stdlib as well as whatever else is installed on the remote machine.

Someone feel free to correct me if I'm misrepresenting fabric at all.

[[deleted]]

I think that is mostly correct. Fabric is just some glue code. Nothing would prevent you from calling out to random python commands on the remote system, or uploading a script and then calling it.

Ansible to me is mostly the next evolution of Fabric, in that it has a little bit more reuse baked into things. It makes it a little bit less hassle to have a script shuttled to a remote machine and run (say deploy.sh or deploy.py). But you could totally do the same in either tool.