I've been searching for a configuration and deployment manager tool for my java-linux based web service and have been looking mainly at ControlTier (http://controltier.org).
We operate at a medium scale (100's of hosts, multi-DC, dozens of services).
There seem to be be plenty of lower level system admin tools such as chef, puppet, cfengine, bcfg2 and more and my understanding and the reason I'm calling them "low level" is that they are great for system level administration tasks such as setting up a mount, file permissions, users etc but aren't designed, for example for java deployments, which usually come with a build process and special java semantics. In many cases any tool can be used to do anything but if it was not designed for the task it can get uncomfortable.
OTOH control-tier seem to have been designed just for that - java application deployments, at least that's what all the tutorials on their site demonstrate but here's the problem - The wiki at http://controltier.org/wiki/ is pretty good and stuffed with examples and the company behind the open source CT product is very responsive (pushy...) however, I'm yet to have seen any material from 3rd party users on the net. No success stories, no detailed blog posts, no best practices, no cheat sheets, not even hate letters, nothing.
This plays badly for DTO solutions, CT's sponsor for two reasons, one is that it makes me suspicious what's the reason for the poor adoption? and second, what do I do if I get stuck and there's no help page on CT's wiki page and the mailing list is too slow to answer. I'm stuck with a "free" product that a consultancy company is pushing.
So my question here - I'd be interested in hearing if anyone has had real world experience with CT for java based web app deployments and if he'd thumb up the product? Any other comments that may enlighten me are welcome of course...
