Build on Open Source Puppet with Puppet Enterprise (PE). Part 1 of 3

This is the first of three blog posts about taking your organization to the next level of automation by building from open source Puppet to Puppet Enterprise.

Organizational challenges? You’re not alone!

What are your business needs that made you explore and later implement Open Source Puppet? For most clients, it’s a lack of time and resources. A need to do more –  faster, cheaper and better. Automation eliminates manual work, reduces human errors, speeds up repetitive work, scales up very easily with quality. It also standardizes processes and workflows.

Automation is an unavoidable step in an organization’s journey to remain competitive and survive. That is why you should invest in tools that promote that. Automation frees your engineers to focus on the important aspects of your business – creating a better product and delivering innovation.

With Open Source Puppet, you have seen the value in Puppet. You want to keep that. However your needs have evolved as your organization has grown. You need more functionality and a more polished solution to innovate faster and integrate more components of your infrastructure into the Puppet ecosystem. These difficulties may be frustrating but it’s basically just a sign of your growth and success and a signal its time to embrace the tools to solve them.

Are you facing any of these new challenges?

• You need to reduce the time it takes to deploy your infrastructure, and reduce human errors

You need a reliable way to deploy and roll back at a moment’s notice. Your business is dynamic and your infrastructure needs to match that. You want a workflow to test and deploy Puppet code across environments without interruption.

• You need to comply with certifications and regulations and increase security

As your business grows and take on bigger clients, you must adopt certifications and comply by different regulations. You need to audit your infrastructure and enforce compliance to ensure you meet regulations. You need a platform that facilitates this, without compromising speed and agility.

• You depend on one employee to run your infrastructure

If your team has developed an in-house solution to run your infrastructure, most typically only one or two people actually know the details on how to operate it. Without knowing it you have become totally dependent on a single employee. You may be left with a gap in your critical infrastructure if they leave. It’s time to move to a standardized technology well-known by engineers within the IT industry thus ensuring business continuity.

• As your business has grown and your company matured, many of the tools, solutions and processes used to build and maintain the initial version of your product can no longer keep up with the ever faster expansion and growth of your company. These tools, solutions and processes may keep your company afloat, but they are far from the ideal and most optimal approach. They have become the limiting factor. You need a solution that securely scales as quickly as your organization grows.
• Increasingly, your engineers are having to build features to expand their automation capability when you suspect those features are widely available in commercial offerings such as Puppet Enterprise.

It’s time to move forward – here’s how.

If you face some or all of these challenges, it’s a sign that you should consider moving to a more polished commercial platform and embrace all the benefits that come with it. You have outgrown Open Source Puppet and need to move to a more robust solution. Puppet Enterprise was designed to meet the needs of growing businesses. That’s what you need – to migrate to Puppet Enterprise!

What are the real differences between Open Source Puppet and Puppet Enterprise?

As you know, Open Source Puppet allows you to write infrastructure as code, write baseline configurations, prevent configuration drift, automate deployments and roll backs, handle compliance. Although you can modify and adapt it to your needs, it does require expertise to maintain.

Puppet Enterprise includes all the aspects of open source Puppet in addition to delivering:

• Packaged services
• Enterprise scalability
• Role-based access control RBAC
• Professional support.
• Designed for fast-moving distributed teams
• Both model-based and task-based capabilities
• Both agent-based and agent-less capabilities

Puppet Enterprise enables you to easily scale your infrastructure as your company grows. You can automate what you want, and how you want. With Puppet Enterprise, you can make your infrastructure actionable, scalable and intelligent.

For a technical comparison, please click this link

Check out the next post on this topic… HERE

In the next blog post, we discuss further why growing businesses choose Puppet Enterprise over Open Source Puppet and provide some detail about Puppet Enterprise’s great features.