Learning MCollective

Chapter 14. Challenges of Worldwide Parallelism

MCollective provides an amazing toolset for orchestrating change in every environment, from small labs all the way up to global enterprises around the world. I’m familiar with a company that manages more than 200 global sites. I’ve assisted a different company managing more than 6,000 servers in a central site, with hundreds more at remote data centers. MCollective’s ability to function well in both environments is unparalleled. 

MCollective will likely work in any small environment right out of the box. To make MCollective work in either of the large-scale environments just mentioned required extensive tuning of the server and broker configurations. Much like a database server, file server, or any other major infrastructure service, you’ll need to tune it to operate at scale.

Let’s review some of the configuration options you’ll want to tune:

• Choose an encryption level suitable to protect your middleware, as shown in “Anonymous TLS” and “CA-Verified TLS Servers”.

• Choose a security plugin that meets your needs for authentication and authorization, as discussed in “How Authentication Works”.

• Define authorization controls to restrict access to specific servers and agents, as shown in “Authorization” and Chapter 12.

• Set up a network of brokers or master/slave redundancy to service multiple sites or high-availability needs, as shown in “ActiveMQ Clusters”.

• Tune the middleware brokers and servers for wide area networking, or ...