Introducing the target settings and policies
Before we embark on the journey of using these four automation frameworks, we need to clarify what we want to accomplish. After all, to truly compare automation frameworks, we need to test each framework with the same tests each time.
The idempotency of actions
Whenever we create a remote management environment with a central repository, we need to consider the impact of running remote management activities on the system. A very common best practice, strongly adopted by all these frameworks, is idempotency.
An idempotent task is a task that will not modify a system if the system's state is already how it should be. Or, differently put, repeatedly executing a task does not affect the system or the processes that run on it if nothing needs to be changed. As an example, consider loading an SELinux module: if the module is already loaded, then the module should not be reloaded. If it isn't loaded yet, then we will load the...
