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

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

When is it the right time for your organization to move to Puppet Enterprise?

The right time is when Open Source Puppet comes up short! For many of our clients, as they have grown, their open source Puppet failed to meet new challenges. For example, the business increased pressure to deliver better and faster software but the automation team were spending too much time developing in-house solutions and fixing problems.

You want to do the following:

• Write infrastructure as code, to review test and promote it to different environments.
• Guarantee compliance. You need a built-in dashboard to quickly create reports, for audit and trace.
• You want to on-board new recruits and teams with ease and need a higher level of standardization for your organization
• Capability to roll back in the event of a disaster and continue to manage the infrastructure in an emergency.
• Role based authentication control to delegate different tasks to different teams and individuals.
• Enterprise level support, documentation, training and professional services.
• Orchestrate deployments for all levels of infrastructure and apps
• A GUI that will enable access to infrastructure insights, reports and audits as easy to use self service interfaces.

What are the next steps to move from Open Source Puppet to Puppet Enterprise?

Moving to Puppet Enterprise needs to be a formally executed properly governed approach. You need to start by determining what the strategy is and thus what architecture best suits your current business operations but also allows you to scale. Ideally, you won’t throw out the baby with the bathwater! You’ve probably got some great code that you can keep using  – so that requires a rigorous analysis of what version you are on, what you’re moving to and whether or not that code embeds best practice.

Based on our years of experience, there’s no one-size-fits-all migration process. WM Promus Puppet-accredited engineers always start with some basic questions such as:

• Are you using an external node classifier (ENC) or static node definitions?
• What version of open source Puppet are you using?
• Are you using plugins written in-house like custom facts, providers, or functions?

Reach out to us – we’re happy to help.

As automation experts and evangelists, we’re as keen as you that your migration is seamless, successful and soon!