iLike HJK and Puppet
This is a post from Luke's old blog; it is saved here statically for historical purposes, as of October 2008
As I mentioned, John Willis posted about Puppet, and in his post he mentions that iLike uses Puppet. Well, Adam Jacob, one of the partners at HJK Solutions, which is the company that did the Puppet work for iLike, has written up a bit more information:
Puppet enables us to get a huge jump-start on building automated, scaleable, easy to manage infrastructures for our clients. Using puppet, we:
- Automate as much of the routine systems administration tasks as possible.
- Get 10 minute unattended build times from bare metal, most of which is data transfer. Puppet takes it the rest of the way, getting the machines ready to have applications deployed on them. Its down to two and a half minutes for Xen.
- Bootstrap our clients production environments while building their development environment. I cant stress how cool this really is. Because we are expressing the infrastructure at a higher level, when it comes time to deploy your production systems, its really a non-event. We just roll out the Puppet Master and an Operating System auto-install environment, and its finished.
- Cross-pollinate between clients with similar architectures. We work with several different shops using Ruby on Rails, all of whom have very similar infrastructure needs. By using Puppet in all of them, when we solve a problem for one client, weve effectively solved it for the others. I love being able to tell a client that we solved a problem for them, and all its going to cost is the time it takes for us to add the recipe.
Puppet, today, is a tool that is good enough to handle the vast majority of issues encountered in building scalable infrastructures. Even the places where it falls short are almost always just a matter of it being less elegant than it could be, and the entire community is working on making those parts better.
I'm very happy to see people successfully building businesses around Puppet, and it's great to see that companies who are getting press are depending on Puppet to manage those famous applications.
