[Opinion] Munki 2.x vs waiting for Jamf for updates

Patience ;)

While you could roll out an entirely new infrastructure purely to push software, it strikes me as like curing the disease by killing the patient. You're probably better off having a look at AutoPKG (especially AutoPKGr ) and Patchoo.

I personally dislike the multiple management tool route, as I don't see it doing anything other than causing double the workload.

JAMF is currently in a much needed bug squashing cycle, as evidenced by several of the last versions release notes. Hardly any new features, but plenty of defects being addressed.
Once they are through that cycle and have a solid version 9.x foundation, I'm sure they will be putting out the new features, like the patch management system shown at JNUC last year.

I've taken a look at Munki 2.x, and I will say I'm impressed with what I saw. They've done a great job with it. The new managed software update, or whatever its now called, is very much like Casper Suite's Self Service, possibly even a little better actually, though that depends largely on your point of view.
If I were starting from scratch for managing a Mac environment, and my primary focus was patch management, I'd certainly be taking a serious look at Munki, and AutoPkg. That's not to say I would definitely implement it over Casper. Hard to say really (support would also play a role in that decision) What I probably would avoid unless necessary, is to implement both of them at the same time. I know there are companies doing that, but, unlike say, creating some custom scripted workflows, having to manage and maintain both Munki and Casper Suite infrastructure at the same time seems like a lot on someone's plate. Maybe if you're talking about a team of admins, perhaps. But not if I were a one person operation.

I'm not sure if there are any lead times from JAMF on the patching capability. I'm assuming it will be before the next JNUC otherwise they might get some stick! If you were installing Munki as an ongoing system to handle patching it could be worth it, but for it to only run for a few months probably isn't.

If you're mainly interested in providing OS updates via Munki, you can set up Munki to handle Apple software updates without any additional infrastructure needed. In this use case, you don't need to set up a Munki repo and configuration is pretty minimal.

https://code.google.com/p/munki/wiki/AppleSoftwareUpdatesWithMunki

I think mixing-and-matching seems a bit crazy. Either use Casper to install and manage your software, or use Munki. Using both seems insane. If you can do what you need with Casper and it's not too painful, stick with Casper and hope the promised improvements help you.

+1 for AutoPkgr and Patchoo if you already have Casper.