Matt S Trout - The First Thing Tak Did
Channel: Shadowcat Systems
Date: 2012-03-21

Recorded at the Perl Oasis 2012.

Tak is a program for running everything from system commands and shell
scripts up to complex multi step workflow-based requests on multiple
systems simultaneously.

The First Thing Tak Did, He Wrote Himself.

Able to bootstrap cleanly on any LSB compliant system (and, frankly, every
common server OS I've yet tried it on), Tak is able to push its core
components over an ssh connection so while little installation is required
on the master machine, none at all is necessary on those being controlled.

The Second Thing Tak Did, He Wrote The Laws.

Inter-node communications are handled by an extremely simple protocol
encoded on the wire as one-line JSON objects, which makes socat a viable
if not particularly thrilling client - but combine it with a little
convention and the messaging is rich enough to put together extremely
capable systems in very little code.

The Third Thing Tak Did, He Wrote The World.

Having established how the building blocks fit together ... well, you'll
just have to come along and find out what comes next.