Puppet: No strings to hold me down, to make me fret, or make me frown
Rating: 9 out of 10
IncentivizedUse Cases and Deployment Scope
Puppet Data Center Automation is being used throughout our organization to quickly and reliably deploy and maintain various systems. We currently pull our manifests from Git via Puppet to stand-up brand new (virtual) servers and configurations without worrying about configuration drift on each independent snowflake. Using Puppet allows us to automate and streamline multiple aspects of our day-to-day operations and works well within our release process to provide us with solid infrastructure-as-code solution.
Pros
- Provides a reliable mechanism for deploying infrastructure-as-code, especially when integrated with source control (such as Git).
- Manages system configuration drift to provide greater stability and system up-time; the same configuration-as-code can be pushed out over and over.
- A strong asset when moving teams towards DevOps by providing development a way to take control of their own assets.
Cons
- A bit of a steep learning curve but something that can be easily understood once a few basics are grasped and use of Puppet is put into practice.
- Does not fit well with existing infrastructure but that is not necessarily a failing with Puppet but can require a radical shift in thinking and procedures to reliably implement.
Likelihood to Recommend
Well-suited for:
- Deploying infrastructure-as-code from a central version-control repository
- Providing a reliable mechanism for quickly building out new datacenters or recovering from a major disaster-type event
- Standardizing middleware, code, and configurations running systems and applications
- Automatically pushing configurations out to multiple clients from a central repository
- Managing existing infrastructure and/or forcing a standard configuration onto already-deployed and running infrastructure
Anthony Parcero
Release Engineer in Information Technology at Paychex (10,001+ employees)
Vetted Review
3 years of experience