Agile Web Operations

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 difference between the two. Puppet claims to enable the user to automate server management to a large extent, a goal which we already reached by implementing our custom Capistrano recipes. So, what are the differences between the two?

Photo by priittammets

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. The configuration library, however, is what really distinguishes Puppet from its predecessor.