Item: Puppet Enterprise
Rating: 8
Author: Charles Inglese

Overall Satisfaction with Puppet Data Center Automation

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our organization uses Puppet Data Center Automation in our integration and test environments as well as in operations. The systems integration team uses Puppet to automate redundant tasks as well as simplify deployment of complex system configurations to benefit system maintainers and installers that are not trained in the intricacies of the platforms and tools being implemented.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Automation of redundant tasks
Abstraction of complex tasks
Integrates well with other community/open-source projects (e.g. Cobbler, Foreman)

Cons

System user interfaces (e.g. Puppet Dashboard)
Integrated support for password management
Backend Ruby scripts are very embedded and cumbersome to find/edit in cases where manual bug workarounds are necessary to implement

Return on Investment

Reduced training costs for system operators/maintainers
Decreased deployment errors and system stand-up time
Increased user adoption

Alternatives Considered

Chef

HPSA is a licensed product and incurs significant upfront investment costs due to COTS licensing. Puppet Data Center Automation has a significantly lower upfront investment and product documentation is more readily available. Chef is a very similar offering, however, at the time our decision was considered, the adoption of Chef vs. Puppet was significantly less in the community.

Other Software Used

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, Red Hat Gluster Storage, Cloudera Enterprise, Cloudera Manager

Likelihood to Recommend

Puppet Data Center Automation is well suited where the system configuration is to remain as static as possible (minimal changes to operating system and environment) and across more than 3-5 nodes. The amount of overhead to stand-up a robust Puppet solution is not worth it if managing less than 3-5 systems. It is not well suited for development environments where developers and engineers are constantly changing the baseline, and subsequent Puppet runs will modify targeted files back to their original configuration.

Comments

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Puppet Data Center Automation is a great addition to our organization