Puppet: configuration management made easy

By Sam Varghese
Tuesday, 28 April 2009 07:06

Technology

When James Turnbull had his first look at the Puppet configuration management system two years ago, he had no inkling of the extent to which he would get involved in the project.
Turnbull works in the security field and has been sustaining an interest in FOSS and IT since he was in his late teens. While not a hardcore coder, in his role as a security professional at a large corporate he has increasingly turned to FOSS for solutions not available in the proprietary world.

Turnbull was looking for configuration management tools when he came across Puppet , a project that was started by Luke Kanies in 2004.

"I maintain a fairly large test environment, and I'm always rebuilding boxes and having to reconfigure them," Turnbull said in an interview. "And there's nothing more annoying - because often you know, I've destroyed the test VM."

He was thus interested in ways of automating the rebuild and reconfiguration process. "Especially, after I've made a change, how to have it automatically reset itself back to a default. I could take snapshots of VMs, but that's a bit too time-intensive, and you use a lot of space. A lot of the changes are small, so I was looking at automated tools.

Turnbull had a look at Cfengine and BCFG2 ; the former he found too complex to implement. "Then I came across Puppet. I was very impressed with the fact that the language was very simple. It was a very simple way of describing configuration. it's really easy to configure. And I guess it had a really broad spectrum of configuration management options at the time, and that's even larger now," he says.

"As you do with these things, you install it, and then you go, 'I wish it did X, Y, and Z, and I wish it did X, Y and Z this way.' All of a sudden, I found myself logging tickets."

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