[Puppet Users] Re: Puppet Proposal (what problems will puppet solve)

Bjørn Dyre Dyresen
Tue, 03 Feb 2009 10:47:11 -0000

2009/2/2 Zach Buckholz <zach.buckholz@apollogrp.edu>

>
> This may sound like a confusing / trick question, so please bare with me.
>
> What problem(s) will puppet solve? Why would I use it?
>
> I am trying to pitch the use of puppet in our environment and need to
> follow a formal proposal model. Which means I need to start with a problem
> to solve or situation to improve.
>
> The concept of what puppet will do needs to be explained to non-technical
> business leaders.
>
> This is what I have come up with so far; (I wish the reductive labs site
> had a wiki page for this)
>
>     What is the problem?
>         Unknown configurations
>         Environment is not dynamic
>         Messy
>         No central model
>         Hard to change
>         No consistency
>         Administration overhead
>         Reactive instead of proactive
>         Unorganized
>         Need scripts to work with linux and solaris
>         Hard to scale
>
> Can anyone add (non-technical explanations) to the above list?
>
>
>     Zach
> >  This message is private and confidential. If you have received it in
> error, please notify the sender and remove it from your system.
>
>


If you are consistent in your use of puppet you can use puppet as a
documentation resource.
Need to know how a particular server is configured? Look at the puppetcode!

With puppet you can move servers with ease!
you write generic classes or modules. Need to move a particular service?
Just include it somewhere else!

For consistency it''s really easy to apply the same configuration to a
lot of
hosts.  Need to add a host? Well, just add it to the host group, and puppet
takes care of it!

As for administration overhead. Puppet will give you less work to do! How?
You just make a puppet manifest/module/class/whatever suites you that takes
care of a certain thing. You know it works! You don''t have to remember
how.
Next time, just apply it to a host! And Done!

If you need scripts to work on multiple platforms, Puppet does this really
well. Just add eg a case statement selecting what to apply based on
operating system.

Puppet scales well. Having server being puppetmaster set up with
nginx/mongrel/puppet we can restart puppet 100 nodes at the same time having
no troubles at all. The server being a dual quadcore with 16 gb of ram is
serving approx 200 nodes and is not sweating a bit. Could easly serve the
double.