September 23, 2021

How To Scale Your Automation With Puppet Enterprise

Infrastructure Automation
Products & Services

Puppet Enterprise makes scaling the automation of your infrastructure easy, no matter its size and complexity. As a powerful automation tool that ensures efficiency and reliability, you can easily automate tasks at scale, such as provisioning, configuration, and application deployment.

In this article, we’re exploring how Puppet Enterprise enables companies to successfully automate their infrastructure at scale.

Table of Contents:

How To Scale Your Automation With Puppet Enterprise

Puppet Enterprise is meant to be an automation tool your organization can grow with. It offers agent-based and agentless automation capabilities across multiple servers, operating systems, and applications, all from a single centralized location. Unlike Open Source Puppet, it is designed to automate tasks on a larger scale.

Many companies using Open Source Puppet (OSP) find that as their companies grow, their architectures must scale exponentially. Simply put, they reach a point where they outgrow OSP and need something that will drive sustainable growth at scale.

Puppet Enterprise supports the ability to scale the automation of a growing architecture in multiple ways. Let’s take a closer look.

Large-Scale Architectures? No Problem!

With Puppet Enterprise, there’s no need to worry about how it will scale across your environment, as several architectures are available depending on the number of nodes you have. You can start out with a single server and scale up by adding additional components as needed. For example, you can scale beyond 2,500 nodes by adding one or more compilers and a load balancer to distribute the workload. No maintenance needed! Puppet Enterprise manages compilers for you and keeps them healthy.

If you want to scale beyond 20,000 nodes, you can do so by separating the database into its own server (or HA cluster). Our largest customers are running more than 100,000 nodes this way. That’s 4.8 million check-ins per day! Puppet professional services also provide experts to guide you through the process.

RBAC

As Puppet users and teams scale across an organization, it’s become essential to enable role-based access control (RBAC). Puppet Enterprise features RBAC that allows you to delegate permissions and control what people can create, edit, run, and delete at a granular level. You can use groups and user roles to efficiently set permissions without administrative overhead.

Puppet Enterprise also lets you leverage your existing external directory. It supports OpenLDAP and Active Directory, so if you have predefined groups in either of these, you can just simply import these groups into the console and assign user roles to them.

Puppet Enterprise 2021.0 and newer releases now offer support for SAML 2.0, which provides additional security options like federated identities and multi-factor authentication.

Scale Automation With Puppet Comply and CD For PE

You can scale your automation capabilities with Puppet Enterprise add-ons like Puppet Comply and Continuous Delivery for PE (CD for PE).

Puppet Comply

Puppet Comply lets you enforce security and compliance by ensuring you get a holistic view of CIS compliance status throughout cloud and on-prem environments. You can easily generate reports to prove that systems remain in check, and enforce immutable policy-as-code with expert-built content and compliance modules configured to your environment.

Continuous Delivery for Puppet Enterprise

You are also able to deploy applications with confidence with Continuous Delivery for Puppet Enterprise, which complements an infrastructure-as-code approach. Safely scale your desired state automation across teams and provide greater insight and confidence that changes across the infrastructure are implemented safely.

Continuous Delivery for Puppet Enterprise also allows you to see the potential impact of proposed code changes, so there are no surprises, and you can take necessary action for success.

Get Started With Puppet Enterprise

Puppet Enterprise makes growing and scaling automation easy, efficient, and reliable so that you can confidently deliver the applications and services that your customers expect. Download a free trial and get started automating your infrastructure at scale today!

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