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Is Puppet the right tool for the jump?
November 03, 2017

Is Puppet the right tool for the jump?

Alan-Michael Barnes | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Puppet Data Center Automation

The company is really engineering driven, so Puppet is being used across the entire organization in order to maintain the configuration and also as a deployment tool when it comes time to GM a new version of one of our applications. Before the use of puppet in this organization there was a longer, more drawn out deployment process which required manually interacting with every host being updated.
  • Maintain configurations
  • Create a more organized look at what it takes to run a particular application
  • Automate deployments
  • Coming from Chef, I was much more used to everything being executed from the top down, Puppet executes actions at random and so if you need something like a directory to be created before a file is placed you will need to explicitly declare the order of execution.
  • Coming from Chef I also learned to love the knife command, this allows you a few things, but a very valuable action allowed by the knife command is the ability to list nodes that are currently running Chef.
  • The ability to use commands across multiple host in parallel(once again, a knife command).
  • Cut deployment times down to around 1 hour from 4-5 hours.
  • Allows us to get a fully running system up from scratch in around 30 minutes.
  • Allows for a more clear view of what is required to get a host running.
Puppet was selected before I joined the team, had it been my choice I would have much rather went with Chef as it has the ability to do things that Puppet has not yet added to their system such a the ability to quickly query what host currently are allowing puppet to maintain their files or the ability to run remote commands without having to include it in a manifest like Chef does with the knife command.

Salt allows you to do similar things to the knife command that is included with Chef, and also allows you to transfer files quickly to multiple host at once with a short simple command.
Puppet is good enough to get the job done, you can use it to automate deployments and maintain files and configurations, if this is all you're looking for it's great.

If you're looking for more control over your systems as a whole without having to write your own scripts or install multiple configuration management systems then Puppet is not what you're looking for.