How to Scale Automation from Simple Scripts to Enterprise-Ready with Puppet Enterprise

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.

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 find that as their companies grow, their architectures must scale exponentially. Simply put, they reach a point where they outgrow Open Source Puppet 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.

Role-Based Access Control (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 also offers support for SAML 2.0, which provides additional security options like federated identities and multi-factor authentication.

Security Compliance Management

Security Compliance Management, an exclusive feature of Puppet Enterprise, lets you enforce security and compliance by ensuring you get a holistic view of CIS compliance status throughout cloud and on-prem environments.

Security Compliance Management automatically generates compliance reports to prove that systems remain in check. Security Compliance Enforcement, available for Puppet Enterprise and Open Source Puppet, enforces immutable policy-as-code (PaC) aligned to CIS Benchmarks and DISA STIGs for faster, simpler compliance that still enables the flexibility to scale up.

Continuous Delivery

Continuous Delivery, also offered exclusively in Puppet Enterprise, Safely scale your desired state automation across teams and provide greater insight and confidence that changes across the infrastructure are implemented safely.

Additionally, as you scale up your use of automation, it's important to know how automatically deployed code will affect other parts of your expanding system. Impact Analysis, a premium feature for Puppet Enterprise, lets you preview the potential impact of proposed Puppet code changes, including dependencies and drift that'll throw your Puppet-managed components out of your desired state.

Start Scaling Automation 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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Learn more

• Puppet's 101 guide to IT automation
• How to do automation the right way
• Avoid common missteps when getting started with automation
• Download the white paper on The Business Case for IT Automation
• How to connect Puppet Enterprise to Okta using SAML
• Read all about the benefits of IT automation