You rely on both network hardware to power your data center and your team of specialists to handle the configuration and ongoing management of this equipment. However, the specialized knowledge required to manage the network and the onset of tool proliferation, operational costs, and consistency across the organization have likely become a major concern for IT leaders.

Having to rely on manual processes to review proposed rule changes and checking that firewall updates comply with security policies slows down the entire application deployment, and having to log in to each device's user interface to perform firewall management at scale adds more overhead to the whole management process.

Rather than manually manage your networking devices, Puppet modules available from the Forge allow you to manage these devices using the same declarative configuration management language as the rest of your infrastructure and benefit from the same reliable consistency you've come to expect from Puppet.

Using infrastructure as code to manage the network offers these benefits:

  • DevOps collaboration: You are already used to applying DevOps collaboration practices to compute and storage devices, but now you can apply them to your network too.
  • Operational unity: Manage your network the same way you manage other components like storage or compute and unify your change management processes and tooling.
  • Operational insight: Get change management and change insight for all your infrastructure, including your network.

 

Many teams, one language

Puppet’s human-readable configuration language lets previously siloed teams collaborate on changes that span compute and network resources. Because Puppet implements infrastructure as code, those cross-team changes can be written, reviewed, tested, and deployed in concert. Say goodbye to multiple teams coordinating their separate deployments through tickets and lengthy conference calls.

When you have a single tool to unify change management processes and monitor deployments across multiple teams, you dramatically increase IT performance. We learned years ago in the 2017 State of DevOps report that the most important factors for achieving high IT performance depend on managing infrastructure as code.

 

Learn more

See the integration pages for specific device families for more information