Prior to using Puppet, managing the Mac OS X systems in our network was a challenge. There was a real lack of visibility the network and their configuration.
Puppet has made a real difference to our administrators who were previously having to walk to each Mac and service it individually.
Allan Marcus, Solutions Architect at Los Alamos National Laboratory
One problem we have is with students submitting to SAGrader right before assignment deadlines, causing large spikes. So we needed a way to handle these spikes efficiently by launching cloud instances, and robust configuration management became essential. I think managing images for cloud instances is a pain. Managing configurations instead with Puppet is fun.
James Barton – Ideaworks
Configuration management automation is critical the success of our SaaS-enablement cloud platform. It allows us to be more efficient with human resources and ensures consistency and reproducibility for deployed applications. The community is supportive, and Puppet Labs keeps Puppet evolving to adapt to the ever-changing needs of enterprise IT.
Matthew Porter, CEO, Contegix
Though we don’t have thousands of nodes to manage, we do have a fair amount of complexity in our environment, with short implementation cycles, and a small staff to manage the infrastructure. Without a way to impose structure and repeatability to our server configurations, our environment would spin rapidly back into chaos. Puppet allows us to accomplish this, while at the same time reducing after-the-fact documentation requirements, which would often be “left for later” anyway. In essence, describing and implementing our configuration are combined into the same task.
Bryce Lynn, Sr. Systems Administrator, Zinio LLC
Configuration management automation is critical to our success, allowing us to be more efficient and have a more stable computing infrastructure. Puppet has been instrumental in enabling us to achieve our automation goals. The community is supportive, and Puppet Labs ensures that Puppet is constantly evolving to keep up with the ever-changing needs of enterprise IT.”
Tom McGonagle, AthenaHealth
Puppet has allowed us to simplify our system configuration as the number of servers continue to grow, which allows a very small operations team to tackle complex projects instead of struggling with huge numbers of basic system administration tasks. Configurations can now be easily deployed to test machines by simply adding a Puppet class instead of having to work through the intricacies of a piece of software and it’s configuration and dependencies by hand each time.
Chris Kelly, SugarCRM
Puppet is an integral part of our systems management tool set. We use puppet to manage services running on Linux systems in our datacenter, POPs, and labs. The great thing about configuration management with Puppet is that we don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time we setup a new service or install a server. For instance, configuring an Apache server only requires including the apache class and adding a vhost config. Thinking of infrastructure as code is definitely the way to go.
Eric Heydrick, Speakeasy
We moved from an outsourced managed hosting solution to an inhouse managed hosting web platform. We use puppet to manage our web platform, which are mainly Virtual machines. All our puppet scripts are managed using git and devided up into 3 main branches, (Testing, Acceptation & Production). We use puppet to setup and deploy our web application servers on the servers, this reduced a lot of setup time for each deployment during our platform migration, and new rollouts.
Tom Mulder, Reed Business
On one of the assignments for a Snow B.V. (a Dutch Unix consultancy company) customer, we used Puppet for configuration management automation on a large environment. Puppet has been enabling us to achieve our automation goals. The community is supportive, and Puppet Labs ensures that Puppet is constantly evolving to keep up with the ever-changing needs of enterprise IT.
Pieter de Rijk, Snow B.V.
Deploying a configuration management and automation system that actually works is a watershed moment for any operations department. There is before and there is after. We couldn’t imagine going back. Puppet allows us to solve problems once and move on. That means our operations engineers focus on solving new problems when they come to work. We work smarter and get more done. The community is supportive, and Puppet Labs ensures that Puppet is both stable and constantly evolving. We love Puppet.
Tom Cignarella, Vice President of Technical Operations and Support, Clickability
Today one of our servers went down and took its disk with it. Instead of wading through the VMWare virtual disk recovery documents, I simply cloned an existing machine, changed the hostname, and let puppet re-configure it. 25 minutes later with a couple of restores from backup, we’re back in business. How long would it have taken to recover and fix a 100GB VMWare hard drive? I don’t know and I don’t care. All of my configs are managed by puppet, protected by subversion, accessible with a couple of commands.
Erik Froese, New York University