Puppet

March 5, 2010 by ofadmin

Recently a customer asked us to improve their current automation setup and centralize the Configuration management . They required a flexible system, fast, scalable and easy to maintain.
 
We drew up a proposal built around the open source project puppet in combination with ldap and subversion. We implemented a flexible setup with complete automation of their servers; using the ldap as backend for the user accounts, rights and server configurations.
 
We set the ldap up to serve a tree with groups like development/staging/production and a separate tree for webservers, db servers, fileservers and so on. By changing the settings in the ldap, a host from group for example, and running a puppet update; the changes are automatically executed for the relevant servers.
This is the great strength of puppet!
 
A side effect to this setup is the speed. Installing a fresh server from scratch to ready for the production takes about 15 minutes.
Its Unlimited Scalability!
 
The subversion side of the setup was implemented for configuration revision control. Thus tracking all changes and as an added bonus also creating a backlog of what is changed and by who.
 
Our client is very satisfied with our setup and we have, since our initial implementation, set up 3 different environments with each more than 60 servers. We are planning the migration of several hundred more servers to this setup.
 
This solution is powered by Puppet on Suse Linux machines.