Tools like Puppet and Chef are great at managing the state of a single node. However, with any piece of infrastructure that expands beyond a single node, things can get complex pretty quickly. In times where the state of the systems change, there often are a multitude of steps that need to occur to ensure that the intended state is met. However, because tools like Puppet and Chef are node-centric, you often find yourself waiting a long time for eventual convergence as a code is executed for a node, updated state data transferred to some upstream data server (Chef server, PuppetDB), and then other nodes converge with updated data. Depending on the task, this convergence time can be killer.
In contrast, StackStorm is an event-driven automation framework that will help perform the incremental tasks across many systems necessary to properly move from one state to another. Common examples include ensuring that Load Balancers are up before advertising network services, ensuring SQL standby servers are alive before enabling replication, and so forth. Each of these steps is going to require an imperative set of steps to transition between states. With StackStorm, we plug into a multitude of tools (including Puppet and Chef!) that provide event updates as actions take place, intercept these triggers, and execute workflows. In many cases, we have clients that heavily use a configuration management tool like Puppet or Chef, but rely on StackStorm to orchestrate the various runs of these tools on different nodes as checkpoints are reached. In this way, decrease the feedback loop as you have StackStorm listening for "run finished" notifications from these CM tools, and then we can go and figure out what is next by kicking off actions or workflows as necessary.
There is absolutely a ton more about StackStorm beyond this immediate answer. In addition, we include things like Role Based Access Control, ChatOps support, full audit trails, and more. I encourage you to check it out and provide feedback. We'd absolutely love to help!
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