Traditionally, rolling out an X.509-style PKI has been a lot of work. You’ve got to create the CA, generate all the necessary private keys and distribute them securely, create signed certificates and distribute those, and then do it all again when renewal time comes around.
Since Chef 0.10.10, there’s been a new core resource for installing Ruby gems to support Chef cookbooks: chef_gem.
I found another gotcha when embedding MCollective in a larger application: Ruby’s YAML library situation. Historically Ruby has used the Syck library, but since 1.
MCollective is “a framework to build server orchestration or parallel job execution systems”. It’s very easy to create and deploy agents to your hosts, and then interrogate or instruct them with simple command-line tools.