Here at TDWTF, we’re happy to announce that Puppet Labs have renewed their sponsorship of TDWTF.

DevOps and infrastructure automation are at that critical cusp, where everyone’s talking about the buzzword, and everyone knows that it’s important, but most people don’t know exactly what it means to “do DevOps”. The tools we use to build infrastructure and deploy applications are changing fast, and the complexity is increasing: and complexity means more opportunities for WTFs.


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We don’t get a lot of application deployment stories submitted by our readers, which honestly surprises me. Application deployment is hard, and I’ve seen it get screwed up in a number of ways (I once supported an application that pushed all of its logic into the database layer because the deployment procedures for that environment were more lax than on the web environment!). Tools like Puppet streamline, improve and automate deployments.

That’s where Puppet Application Orchestration comes into play. It’s an application deployment tool that integrates with all of the automation Puppet already offers. It will be part of Puppet Enterprise 2015.3.

Too many organizations still have manual application deployment processes that are slow and error prone (I’ve also seen “just copy the compiled DLL into a network share that everybody’s client app points to” deployments). Puppet Application Orchestration puts everything together, extending its existing concept of “nodes” and adding your applications as “resources”, which gives Puppet all the context it needs to manage those services.

Even the most trivial data-driven application depends on a complex pile of underlying infrastructure (NTP, DNS, gateways and firewalls) and services (your database, your application and web servers, the load balancer), plus the application code itself. Changes anywhere in that stack have to be controlled, they have to happen in a very specific sequence, and we need to be able to test these changes. Puppet can manage and automate the entire stack, which gives you everything you need.

Thanks again to Puppet for sponsoring our site, and helping us bring more WTFs to you. You can learn more about Puppet by signing up for their Puppet Enterprise 2015.3 Webinar, watching their CEO Luke Kanies’ PuppetConf Keynote, and staying up to date on Puppet Application Orchestration news

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