Open source projects

The earliest version of Puppet — the most widely used open source IT management system — was created in 2005 by Luke Kanies, founder of Puppet, to easily automate repetitive and error-prone system administration tasks. Puppet's easy-to-read declarative language allows you to declare how your systems should be configured to do their jobs. It's a very different approach from procedural languages, which require you to describe the step-by-step process for configuring systems. Puppet lets you set up systems quickly and move on to the rest of your work, knowing Puppet will enforce system states as you’ve defined them.

More about Puppet

• Download Open Source Puppet
• Puppet technical documentation

Beaker is a cloud-based acceptance testing harness for open source Puppet, Puppet Enterprise and other Puppet projects. It can be used as a provisioner for setting up virtual machines, running any configuration on those machines and then exiting.

Facter gathers basic facts about nodes (systems) such as hardware details, network settings, OS type and version, and more. These facts are made available as variables in your Puppet manifests.

• Easy to include specific facts and other custom facts.
• Use facts provided by Facter to inform conditional expressions in Puppet.

Hiera is a key/value lookup tool for configuration data. It keeps your site-specific data separate from modules and manifests, making them easier to construct, read, modify and reuse.

• Re-use Puppet modules by putting necessary data in Hiera.
• Configure your own nodes by providing multiple levels of overrides for default data.

MCollective is a framework for building server orchestration or parallel job-execution systems. It is used to automate execution of administrative tasks on clusters of servers.

• Works with PuppetDB, or do real-time discovery across your network.
• Uses publish/subscribe middleware to communicate with many hosts at once, saving you time.

PuppetDB collects and stores data generated by Puppet so you have a huge inventory of metadata about every node in your infrastructure.

• Searchable database of every resource managed on any node.
• Get the most recent facts, catalog and event reports for every node.

Razor is an advanced provisioning application used to discover and deploy bare-metal machines and virtual systems. Razor lets you automate the process of going from a newly racked machine with no operating system to one that’s fully installed, managed by Puppet and ready to work — with no human intervention.