Puppet is an open source software configuration management and deployment tool. It solves system administrators' problems working with multiple servers by automating the IT infrastructure, and ensuring that all systems are configured to a desired and predictable state. Puppet is written in Ruby, a highly objectoriented programming language.
Lately, in 2022 the company Puppetlabs has been acquired by Perforce - a leading provider of highly scalable development and DevOps solutions. The goal of a new tools for Kubernetes and cloud native apps resulted already in a market consolidation of independent configuration management vendors , eg. Chef has been Acquired by Progress, Ansible has been bought by IBM, and Saltstack has been bought by VMware in 2020. The focus on making data center and cloud infrastructure easily consumable and facing the multi-cloud adoption challenges, the competitor Hashicorp gained between 2015 until 2022 more traction with their products Terraform, Packer, Vault, etc. than Puppet did before. Today the Puppet community embraced the Hashicorp tools at forge.puppet.com.
I had an interesting talk at MeteoSwiss with an IT infrastructure head&expert. MeteoSwiss produces climate information. Engineers do environmental science (environmental and climate change modeling, glacier studies, urban hydrological modeling, meteorological studies) and for their work baremetal performance cpu/gpu/storage/ram is critical. They use Puppet as their preferred configuration management automation tool.
Here some weather observations related weblinks:
- COSMO, Consortium for small scale modeling: https://www.cosmo-model.org/content/support/software/default.htm
- Snowmelt modeling: https://wiki.c2sm.ethz.ch/pub/MODELS/COSMOCuW2019/3_COSMO_User_Workshop_19_TJonas.pdf
- MeteoSwiss Payerne Atmospheric Observatory: http://srnwp.cosmo-model.org/archive/Payerne/support/metadata.pdf
- COSMO Transition to ICON, C2I : https://www.cosmo-model.org/content/support/icon/default.htm, https://www.cosmo-model.org/content/consortium/generalMeetings/general2021/parallel/wg6-c2i/C2I_COSMO-GM_Introduction.pdf
- NinJo Meteorological Workstation: http://www.ninjo-workstation.com/
- Abstractions for Weather and Climate Models: https://pasc17.pasc-conference.org/fileadmin/user_upload/pasc17/program/MS21.pdf
The puppet enterprise platform already powers all MeteoSwiss weather observations related research workstations and server farms. For the planned datacenter projects - new geolocation and adoption to multi-cloud, business continuity management is a main topic.
So, let's start exploring!
Puppetlabs offers Puppet Enterprise (PE) as cloud image for a standard installation available from the AWS Marketplace, Microsoft Azure Marketplace and for the Oracle Cloud Marketplace, see the hardware requirements for cloud deployments. For VMware datacenters, vRealize Automation offers a Puppet Enterprise Integration as well.
This lab contains of following setup:
- Puppetmaster on Azure
- Laptop connected to the internet
- Puppet Agent on VMware Photon OS on Raspberry Pi4 as node
Azure Lab: https://github.com/dcasota/puppetlabs-scripts/blob/main/Azure/README.md
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