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A Hot Commodity, Sysadmins With A Knowledge Of Puppet
By Taylor Gillespie
Expert Author
Article Date: 2011-08-12
Any systems administrator that has had to configure, manage, and maintain more than a handful of machines has sought out and appreciated software that helps out that endeavor. Because maintaining various machines, platforms, and environments can become strenuous when the systems administrator has to visit one and configure it. Even managing multiple scripts that automate the process can become cumbersome when there is not any framework to base the scripts on. In the end, most systems administrators will finding themselves reaching for configuration management software, and typically, more specifically, a highly-involved open source solution. Once in place, configuration management software makes the systems administrators job much easier, though by no means easy.
On a timeshared computer, configuration management was done at a user-level, and that was fine for only one machine. When the machines are connected into a network, and each machine has different users and different services running on them, the task of maintaining those configurations becomes daunting. For many, the need to manage configurations led them to CFEngine; and CFEngine remains popular with large-scale, big name companies and government agencies. It is compliant to many standards-based policies, and has been in development for almost twenty years, and has a bunch of science behind it. When the people responsible for CFEngine introduced a commercial version of the product, and kept features out of the free, community, open source version, it left room open for a configuration management software competitor Puppet to prosper.
Puppet has become more and more popular of the the last few years, due in part in that it is written in Ruby, and that it provides a flexible manner of configuring the machines. In fact, PuppetLabs, the company behind Puppet wrote a blog post, Indeed You Can: Get a Job Using Puppet and Learn More about Indeed.com, that according to Indeed.com (which uses Puppet themselves), the number of job postings seeking applicants with Puppet knowledge and experience practically tripled in the last couple of years. So, even though CFEngine has more development years, more deployments, and more collective user experience than Puppet does, Puppet appears to be leading the way in terms of new installations, developer mindshare, and community activity of modern configuration management software.
About the Author:
Taylor is a Staff Writer for WebProNews
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