PUPPET FOR MANAGED HOSTING PROVIDERS

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Marjory Chase
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1 PUPPET FOR MANAGED HOSTING PROVIDERS

2 THE CHALLENGES Managing the IT infrastructure at a hosting company is not an easy job and it is more difficult if it s a managed hosting provider. You have to provision servers, manage upgrades, manage multiple clients, maintain configurations and much more. Your customers are different and so are their servers and configurations. A few questions that you would like to answer would be How do I organize all the complexities in the servers? How can we reduce the work load of our syadmins? How can we optimize the IT processes? A system administrator s job at a hosting provider is a real hectic one, unless you use the right tools to help you work smart. THE SOLUTION - PUPPET WHAT IS PUPPET? Puppet is a next generation IT automation software for system administrators. Puppet lets system administrators monitor the entire infrastructure life cycle. It also allows you to automate repetitive tasks, deploy critical applications and proactively manage change. REAL LIFE EXAMPLES Let s go through some typical tasks for a managed services provider and see how Puppet and our consulting can help them: Setting up a new server You provision new servers up to a basic level only, using cobbler, kickstart, razor or any other provisioning tool of your choice. After that, you might go in manually and configure and set up everything else. Maybe you have scripts for it, but they are not super-flexible. With Puppet, you integrate the setup of the Puppet agent into your provisioning process. Then, the Puppet agent runs and configures the whole server by itself. Just wait 10 minutes and the bare OS installation will have turned into a fully usable production ready machine. Multiple clients? Do you spend a lot of time on setting up the same simple LAMP stack for every client, with only minor changes for each? Maybe one of your clients prefers CentOS, the other Debian. One is on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, while the other is on the latest Ubuntu version. All of these things cause a headache when they can actually be easily automated. With a proper Puppet repository, the time to set up new servers can be reduced from hours to minutes. No need to know about the details of each version of each distribution, the puppet agent takes care of this. The puppet manifests are therefore the same for each target OS, no matter what the version and distribution are. This saves a lot of time since you can more easily re-use your code, 2

A few questions that you would like to answer would be How do I organize all the complexities in the servers? How can we reduce the work load of our syadmins? How can we optimize the IT processes?

3 making your customers happier and your system administrator more free to work on other, more pressing issues. Changing specific settings When you realise a specific setting in a configuration file needs a change across all your clients (let s say you want to turn on that one option in MySQL that improves performance across all your machines), it is often a headache to change the setting on each server individually. With Puppet, you can easily make a change across multiple clients (without them being able to see each other s environment of course!) and deploy it automatically. Change a few files in one central location, push to git (or your version control of choice) and within 15 minutes, all servers will have the change. It s that simple! BENEFITS OF PUPPET Operational efficiency - Speed of deployment allows you to save time System & Server Consistency Puppet s model-driven framework ensures consistent deployments. It also provides a consistent, clean environment to develop, build and run applications on demand. Speed of Recovery The production operations team can rapidly deploy the right configuration to the right box. If a system gets inappropriately reconfigured, Puppet will automatically revert it back to a known good state, or provide the details necessary to manually remediate a system rapidly. Collaboration - Having a model-driven approach makes it easy to share configurations across the organisation, enabling developers and operations teams. Lower Error Rates & Higher Quality Puppet s highly reliable systems ensure all configuration changes are done correctly. Enhanced Security - Puppet improves the overall security of an IT infrastructure. For example, rather than having an administrator put a security file on each machine manually, they put it in a Puppet recipe that provisions the file to the entire fleet of systems, automating the process to ensure consistency. WHY PUPPET? Supports rapid growth - Puppet can support many users and web pages at one time, whether it is 1 user and 1 page, or 1000 users and 1000 pages. Ease of Use - Puppet is designed to fit the way systems administrators work. Greater Flexibility - Puppet s model-driven approach allows you the flexibility to adapt any infrastructure to the diverse needs of the system it is using. Training & Support - With training and friendly support for enterprise, you can be sure that you will have all the backup you need to accelerate and maximise the benefit of using Puppet. Open Source Solution - It is easier to troubleshoot because you have direct access to the code. 3

performance across all your machines), it is often a headache to change the setting on each server individually.

4 Easy to Deploy and Maintain - Puppet is easy to deploy and support because of its easy scripting language. Virtualised Environment Support It is easy to leverage on Puppet s capabilities to define and reuse a system configuration on-demand to fully realise the benefits of a private cloud and virtualised computing environments. WHY PARTNER WITH OLINDATA? As a hosting / managed services provider, we are happy to explore opportunities to help you provide even better services by managing your clients servers and infrastructure, or help to set them up from scratch and provide them with optimal management services to ensure that their servers and infrastructure will be trouble-free. By partnering with us you can focus on what you are good at: hosting the servers. Let us deal with operating them according to each client s wishes. As for contracts, we have options for both invoicing through you or to your customers directly. Additionally, if you so wish you can white label our services, in which case our consultants will act as if they are providing services under your company name. We ll be happy to discuss these options with you at your convenience. HOW CAN WE HELP? OlinData provides both Puppet Consulting & Puppet Training services. As we are an authorized partner for Puppet Labs, you can be rest assured that your IT infrastructure is in safe hands. We also offer consulting services for the entire Linux ecosystem. PUPPET CONSULTING We offer remote hands-on consulting for Puppet since we have a lot of experience in both small and large environments. We've done conversions from non-puppet environments to puppet environment; we've also set up new environments from scratch and helped out customers who were looking for implementation help or simply just advice on industry best practice. We find it important to not only tell your customers how to do something, but to actually help them implement it as well. That means that we'll be glad to log into their systems remotely and help them implement the specific solutions to their challenges. PUPPET TRAINING OlinData is currently the biggest official PuppetLabs partner in Asia and one of the biggest in Europe. Since we operate mostly in/from South East Asia, we work with lower rates than most westernworld based companies. Our standards are very high though, we only work with the best, handpicked puppet engineers. 4

computing environments. WHY PARTNER WITH OLINDATA?

We provide scheduled public trainings and private, on-site trainings. The public trainings are scheduled across Asia & Europe in places where we see demand for it.

In Europe, we have conducted training in Dublin (Ireland), Kiev (Ukraine), Oslo (Norway), Helsinki (Finland) and Vienna (Austria).

5 We provide scheduled public trainings and private, on-site trainings. The public trainings are scheduled across Asia & Europe in places where we see demand for it. In Asia, we have provided trainings in Hyderabad and Bangalore (India), Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), Manila (Philippines), Jakarta (Indonesia), Seoul (Korea), Singapore & Tel Aviv (Israel). In Europe, we have conducted training in Dublin (Ireland), Kiev (Ukraine), Oslo (Norway), Helsinki (Finland) and Vienna (Austria). Private, on-site trainings can be given anywhere in South East Asia, we require a group of minimum 6 people and maximum 14 for these trainings. The advantage of private trainings is that we can train a larger group from the same organisation at once, as well as gear the training more towards the specific needs of each organisation. Our trainings equip you with a fundamental knowledge of Puppet, how to implement it, and also, the basic knowledge to enable you to sit for the Puppet Master Certification program by Puppet Labs. WHO ARE USING PUPPET OlinData - Professional Open Source Consulting & Training OlinData is a tech company focusing on professional IT management. With highly experienced engineers and trainers, we conduct live, in-depth training workshops and offer worldwide remote consulting for open source solutions. Our high level of expertise ensures that we only deliver the best quality for our training and consulting services; while our proactive service offerings give you optimal service as we work with you to determine what is most suitable and needed for your environment. All logos are trademarks of their respective owners. OlinData is an official PuppetLabs partner. 5

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