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The Power of Puppet
May 09, 2016

The Power of Puppet

Mark Gargiulo | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Puppet Data Center Automation

Let me start by saying like any configuration management software, there is a learning curve and there must exist a respect for what it can do across hundreds or thousands of servers with a single Puppet run, or what it can break with that same ease of use! That being said puppet, working in unison with The Foreman, Mcollective and Hiera, are some of the most powerful, and for me personally, the most enjoyable and rewarding set of admin tools I've used in years.

At my current company we needed to automate deployments and configuration consistency across multiple data centers both Colo and Cloud internationally while remaining flexible enough to change parameters, environment settings and application code in a timely and controllable manner.

We needed a full server life cycle management system that automated provisioning, configuration, changes and clean removal of dynamic resources such as on demand server capacity.

  • Create a specific role based server from a vanilla provisioning template and maintain configuration state via Puppet automated catalog runs.
  • Add new functionality, services or configuration data to all servers or a subset of servers without ever needing to log into them.
  • Integrates seamlessly into other server life cycle technologies such as The Foreman and Mcollective for even greater management and automation.
  • Steep learning curve for first time users.
  • The complexity can get a little overwhelming in a more collaborative deployment methodology across multiple platforms and data centers.
  • Some external changes to Puppet like the new Puppet 4 architecture can cause considerable time consuming migration efforts especially if you have a lot of legacy classes and configuration that do not conform readily to the new design.
  • Less time spent doing simple repetitive server maintenance tasks.
  • Server to Admin ratio is dramatically increased when using Puppet automation.
  • Initial setup and implementation can be time consuming if you need/want a "zero impact" integration.
I have not used any other Configuration Management System since cfengine back in about 2007 so I have little current input on alternatives to Puppet having never used them, though Chef seems to have gained some traction as has Ansible.
Our company deploys across multiple data centers and cloud providers with a need for consistency, scalability and repeatable results. Puppet allows us to achieve this in a way that would be very tedious and time consuming and with very little confidence that the end result would be a "known good" state if we did not utilize the power of Puppet.