SAKURA KCS Built DevOps with Puppet & Changed Their Systems Management Forever

Challenge: Burdensome Tasks & Unstructured Development that Hinders Business Value

It took three staff as long as two hours every day to perform basic monitoring of SAKURA KCS’s extensive IT components. That meant almost an entire full-time work schedule was spent simply detecting and remediating issues. Worse yet, because they were performed manually, routine tasks like server management and changing passwords were also prone to human error. That led to even more issues and firefighting down the line.

One of SAKURA KCS’s key businesses is contracted systems development, which means the company develops and maintains IT systems for its customers. The rise in sophistication of technology and feature requirements made it harder than ever to deliver environments to meet customer expectations.

While the skill gap grew wider, the infrastructure development team itself remained unstructured. Staff were frequently reusing code, developing in siloes, and failing to share verification and knowledge of developed systems across teams. While SAKURA KCS invested in giving developers the skills they needed, they knew that individual merit would only get the overall organization so far.

“It is not only a matter of mere individual improvement, but the development methodologies and environment had to be changed,” said Masahiro Matsumoto, Senior Manager, Cloud Architecture Group at SAKURA KCS. To lower the bar for environment creation and keep up with scale, complexity, and demand, the company knew they’d have to start doing DevOps — implementing smart collaboration, secure development, and strategic automation across their development operations. 

Results: Better Development, Better Ops & More Empowered Systems Engineers

“For a small team managing a vast infrastructure with large quantities of devices, this kind of automation provides a powerful means to increase efficiency and accuracy. Puppet has exceeded the level of being a mere tool at SAKURA KCS Corp and is truly a partner for improving the business. It has a powerful role as an indispensable tool for business.” 

Masahiro Matsumoto, Senior Manager, Cloud Architecture Group, SAKURA KCS

Using Puppet, SAKURA KCS has been able to increase collaboration, clarity, and efficiency of development and operations work across their managed systems. Daily tasks are faster, more accurate, and manageable with fewer dedicated staff. By linking server accounts to Puppet, the SAKURA KCS team can automate routine tasks like password changes, updates, and patching. Instead of configuring and reconfiguring servers one-by-one, a simple change to Puppet code executes the action across the entire fleet at once.

Automated Security, Testing & Collaborative Effort

Puppet state enforcement keeps managed infrastructure in the same desired state until a new change is made to the primary Puppet server, enhancing both predictability and security of development operations. Blocking offending IP addresses for managed systems (a task which often popped up in the middle of the night or on weekends) can now be handled in a new environment created by the SAKURA KCS team and managed by Puppet. Rather than burdening shared staff, on-site operators can specify IP addresses to block, which Puppet continuously enforces on the appropriate servers to maintain desired state.

The company also started using Puppet to automate testing — a key characteristic of DevOps — for end-to-end development and delivery. Using Puppet, SAKURA KCS systems engineers can create virtual environments to test applications, lowering the bar for non-experts to handle specialized tasks in the software development lifecycle (SDLC). These unified virtual test environments, designed by SAKURA KCS’s systems engineers, automate verification of programs developed by its customers’ on-site systems engineers. “The advantage of virtual environments created by Puppet is that all environment settings and test cases can be stored in the code, meaning that they can be shared as assets within SAKURA KCS,” said Matsumoto.

“This brings great benefits from the perspectives of quality and efficiency. Sharing of knowhow and the state of progress also becomes easier, delivering dramatic improvements to the development flow.” 

Working with the Puppet Pros to Build Durable DevOps

Implementing Puppet is a big decision for a company like SAKURA KCS — and the risks of making large-scale changes to their development structure always kept new tools and processes from being properly implemented. SAKURA KCS didn’t make the decision lightly. Their team met directly with Puppet developers to find out how Puppet would operate in specific use cases, what Puppet could improve about the business, and the new processes and operations Puppet made possible. Having access to Puppet professionals and support gave the storied company peace of mind as it charted the future of its IT development practice.

As they expand their DevOps, SAKURA KCS’s teams are coming up with more ways to use Puppet. They also remain in active communication with the Puppet team and the Puppet community, providing feedback about updates, improvements, and additional functionality they’d like to see.

Whether you need to build, accelerate, or course-correct, Puppet desired state management is the only form of automation that can support a DevOps initiative today and into the future. Discover more Puppet use cases — even ones unique to your organization — by requesting a demo with the Puppet team today. 

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