Provision and Configure Public & Private Clouds
Systems administrator’s lives are difficult enough having to manage an incredible number of systems. Even smaller companies and departments within larger companies are managing hundreds or thousands of devices. Virtualized environments can effectively double or triple the number of ‘machines’ being managed. Add to those factors the development of internal clouds and the use of public clouds and, without the right management technology, you can have a recipe for disaster.
Configuration management automation is critical the success of our SaaS-enablement cloud platform. It allows us to be more efficient with human resources and ensures consistency and reproducibility for deployed applications. The community is supportive, and Puppet Labs keeps Puppet evolving to adapt to the ever-changing needs of enterprise IT.
Matthew Porter, CEO, Contegix
Traditional systems management tools have not kept pace with the market dynamics. Conventional approaches to managing large numbers of systems create inconsistencies and mistakes. The real cost is not the time and money spent managing the sprawling configurations, but in the outages caused by mistakes and opportunities precluded by insufficient change management processes. These Legacy tools simply cannot handle the scale and complexity of application lifecycle management in the cloud.
In our cloud stack, the systems managment tool Puppet has vital importance. It empowered us to drastically reduce the complexity of our server infrastructure by delegating different tasks to different servers while improving the fault tolerance. Thanks to the automated and standardized way we nowadays manage our servers with Puppet, we can trust that all our servers are kept in a “defined state.”
Hanspeter Christ, Deputy Process Manager of the Federal Spatial Data Infrastructure, swisstopo
Puppet offers a new approach to system management that lends itself naturally to application in cloud computing environments.
Public Clouds
Puppet is being used by several of the largest providers to manage their public cloud infrastructures. Puppet’s model-driven framework offers unprecedented flexibility, power, and scalability, enabling IT staff to prescriptively build an automated infrastructure. It reduces error counts and downtime, saving countless hours and providing significantly higher service quality. The benefits of automated infrastructure go beyond policy-enforced consistency and auditing. The ability to reliably create new systems running consistent services, creates auto-scaling applications as well as test systems identical to production environments.
Private Clouds
Increasingly companies and government agencies are looking to provide IT services using privately built cloud infrastructures. While this approach offers scaling and resource utilization advantages, the challenge of launching and managing internal clouds without automation can be daunting.
…we needed a way to handle spikes efficiently by launching cloud instances, and robust configuration management became essential. I think managing images for cloud instances is a pain. Managing configurations instead with Puppet is fun.
James Barton, Ideaworks
Puppet abstracts the system from the system administration, providing developers and system administrators with a simple service-based policy framework that provides logical semantics about system configurations and how subsystems are related. Using this approach, IT staff can build a resilient, and stable cloud environment that meets business needs dynamically.