Start using Puppet with the help of Golden Images

This post is part of a blog series which tries to simplify the adoption of configuration management frameworks.

Many admins are already excited about configuration management frameworks like Puppet, that’s good! With these frameworks it is possible to implement all sorts of automation for many operating systems. But does this mean you should automate every task from the beginning to the end with a single tool?
If you can do it, then of course! It has some advantages, for example you need fewer different automation skills in the company. But there is always the big risk that automating a task takes just too long.

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Puppet on Solaris 11.2

The first public beta of Solaris 11.2 is finally available and I am very excited about this release. For some of the highlights check the Oracle Solaris blog.
There is a lot of buzz about the Openstack integration, but for now I am more interested in the integration of the automation framework Puppet. Openstack very likely has a big future and will address IT automation on its own way, but it’s a very new technology.
Puppet on the other hand is in production since many years. But according to my experience, the majority of the users use it for managing Linux systems and not Solaris. With 11.2 Oracle finally embraces Puppet and makes it a lot easier to use the framework for Solaris users.

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Configuration Management Frameworks - Adoption Blockers

Frameworks like Puppet, Chef, Cfengine, or Salt are now available for some years. Their community is huge and „Automation“ seems to be the answer to almost everything in IT.

Many say: If you do system administration for more than one server and you don’t use a configuration management framework, you do it wrong!
I fully agree with this statement. But according my observation, everybody seems to be interested in using such frameworks, however in reality the adoption rate is quite low.

Why is this?

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