An Introduction to Puppet (DevOps Tool) and How It Works

A system administrator’s job mainly comprises of repetitive tasks that need to be performed in a timely manner and this work seems to be much more tedious when the infrastructure of the company grows. Automation is the apt solution to solve the problems of system administrators and scripting seems to be not helping when the machines grow exponentially with the advent of cloud. Hence, the only solution is to have a centralized tool that can build a complete infrastructure with ease. Puppet is one of the available centralized tools that we are going to talk about in this article.

What is Puppet (DevOps Tool)?

Puppet is the most popular and de facto standard for configuration management with more than 36,000 organization across the globe with 75% of Fortune 100 companies using Puppet. Puppet is popular for configuration management in automating the delivery and management of hybrid infrastructure.

With Puppet, the system administrators will be able to control and enforce consistency across infrastructure using a common easy to read language. Sharing, Testing and enforcing the changes across cloud platforms and data center is not going to be breathtaking tasks anymore when Puppet is used.

How does a Puppet work?

Being a popular configuration management tool, Puppet works with the idea of a Master-Slave architecture wherein they communicate through a safe way of a secure encrypted channel with the help of SSL.

Dwelling deep into the architecture of Puppet, the Puppet Master is installed on the main server and is primarily used to manage the whole set of clients to deploy, configure and maintain the infrastructure. Puppet Agent is installed on clients which communicate with the Puppet master and fetch configuration instructions. After installing, it sends the status report to the Puppet master.

Puppet’s flexibility allows you to install the specific software and configuration a system requires and then maintain a specified state after the installation by continuously checking whether it is in place without getting altered.   Puppet is written in Ruby and uses a DSL (Domain Specific Language) to define configuration parameters for a specific environment or infrastructure.

Benefits of Puppet (DevOps Tool)

Here are the benefits of Puppet for your glance

1. Infrastructure as code: Puppet enables to define your infrastructure as code (IAC) with easy of coding few puppet scripts. IAC is an important part DevOps practices such as version control, peer review, automated testing and deployment, and continuous delivery.
2. Any downtime due to configuration issues is reduced to minimum, mostly avoided, as the speed of recovery is pretty fast.
3. Puppet provides a significant time savings with its speed of deployment.
4. Puppet is supported by a larger open source developer platform.
5. Unlike Scripting, Puppet works just fine even on a large infrastructure by automating the repetitive tasks easily.
6. It supports a wide number of platforms such as Microsoft Windows, Debian, BSD, etc.
7. An easy to learn language is being used by Puppet to define the configurations for a host.

Learning Puppet (DevOps Tool) can definitely open up great career opportunities for system administrators. It is equally important to choose SKILLOGIC™ to obtain your Puppet course as it allows you to enjoy the global recognition.