Thursday, August 07, 2008

[Misc] Puppet and Puppetmaster

I am back from Indonesia, and what could be a more worthy topic to write as first blog after the travel? Exactly: Puppet. In Indonesia I listened to the IT Conversations talk with Luke Kanies about his project. Puppet is an open source system-administration framework for Unix-based operating systems. I believe, that puppet shows quite some innovations not easily to be found in other tools and has the potential to be the next step in system administration.

First: the target audience of puppet are system administrators and/or developers that have to roll out and administrate a potential large number of server and client (!) systems. Everyone who has to administrate more than two machines know that doing that manually is for sure not an entertaining business. Now what I believe is puppets strongest idea is, to define an abstraction layer over system administration:

Puppet allowes to define the behaviour of machines in an abstract way by using a language to describe classes of configurations; as in object-oriented languages inheritence is possible. The usual tasks of a sysadmin can be written in the puppet language. More important, puppet tries to abstract from OS details, so it does not matter for ordinary activities like configuring an Apache webserver whether the target OS is Linux, Solaris or BSD. To abstract from concrete resources puppet uses so called resources: a good example are users. As we know, they can be defined and managed in different ways on different platforms and contexts. Puppets resources hence deal with concepts like user, file, cron and so on on different operating systems in the same way.

Essentially puppet can be seen as the missing next step after virtualisation solutions: a virtualisation describes the hardware requirements of a machine, puppet describes the operating system and services requirements. So ideally you define the specifications of your machine (needs Apache Webserver, mysql... version...) and then execute that on the very machine using puppet. If you need a second machine with the same configuration, just reuse the configuration from the first (puppet calls that repeatable configurations).

Puppet is also a tool in the sense, that a so called "puppet-master" can communicate with puppet clients. These clients are under control of the puppet master.

Configurations are idempotent, this means, you do not need to assume a specific context or status on the machine to run a configuration "script". You can simply start a configuration on a specific machine and the configuration definition with puppet brings the machine into the desired state. Actually puppet executed these configurations on a regular interval to keep the machine in the desired state.

As far as I understand puppet so far, it is the next level of system administration (as mentioned above, particularly also in combination with virtualisation) allowing to manage also complex infrastructure. There are apparently already a number of companies and institutions using puppet on a larger scale. Luke Kanies mentiones in his talk that also Google is using puppet so administrate several thousand machines (apparently partly MacOS) but also many other international companies.

Puppet written in Ruby and is provided as Open Source framework, however, one thing that worries me a little bit at the moment is the fact, that there is currently no big community behind puppet. Puppet is the "baby" from Reductive Labs and there essentially from Luke Kanies and I believe few further developers. What I have heard from this project so far is really impressive, and I hope that the project attracts more developers soon and Reductive Labs is open minded enough to open the development to outsiders.

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