Having started out on a Joyent appliance, migrating to Linode, and, finally, to Amazon with a Bitnami stack, we noticed the common pain of manually configuring each of these environments. Bitnami caused us an even bigger headache by being very difficult to update (apt-get doesn’t update the bitnami wrapped AMP stack). We decided to get [...]
Puppet – Open source configuration management tool
Puppet ensures consistency in your IT infrastructure through declarative, executable server configurations. Using a client-server REST API, puppet executions are idempotent. Puppet deployments automatically ensure a rigorous adherence to the defined configuration and promote a well maintained and “surprise free” server environment.
This is a guest post by James Turnbull (@kartar) The first two guys I worked for in Ops jobs were old school mainframe guys. Both of them were kind of rough around the edges. Both heavy smokers who liked a drink and who been around before there were PCs, thought client-server was a passing fad [...]
Automatically setting up and maintaining my servers is a must for me. Only if everything I install and configure on a server is scripted I’m sure I know what’s there and that it stays that way. Having automated infrastructure enables me to schedule a critical setup change at 3 am and be on the safe [...]
Migrating our production environment from debian to OpenSolaris I wanted to simplify our configuration management recipes along the way. What I came up with is a mixture of Puppet style manifests and Capistrano backed ease of use in a new open source project called: Carpet.
This is a guest post by Andrew Shafer, who is part of Reductive Labs, the people behind Puppet. Reductive Labs is helping people build better systems with better tools and processes. Andrew has been on several Agile software teams in various capacities for the past few years, and has a passion for applying Agile principles [...]
Last week, I suggested that SysAdmins are much more agile than we give them credit for. But, when it comes to organizing their day-to-day work they need just as much help as the rest of us. Today, I want to talk about how agile methodologies work just as well in operations as they do in [...]
By now you should have a better understanding of how your data center is setup and exactly what’s all in there. You’ve been carefully monitoring changes to this environment and are ready to take it to the next level. The “Visible Ops Handbook” introduces the concept of “production fuses” : when things go wrong with [...]
The next step to get a better grip on your environment is figuring out exactly what kind of production configurations you have running out there. If you’ve ever caught yourself walking through the data center and wondering just what in the hell those servers in the back corner are for, this phase will be quite [...]
We’re currently using Capistrano not only to deploy our Ruby on Rails application, but also to setup and manage our physical and virtual (Xen based) servers. We have Capistrano recipes for adding users, installing packages like apache or mysql, configuring a Xen VM and more. Coming accross puppet, I started to wonder about the essential [...]
After years spent working with Cfengine, Luke Kanies decided to form the company Reductive Labs in 2005 and Puppet, a long time idea and quickly stabilizing prototype, was born. He describes it as an open-source, next-generation server automation tool. Configuration files (called manifests) are written declaratively, and there is a client/server model for distribution handling. [...]
