WSO2Con2024 - WSO2's IAM Vision: Identity-Led Digital Transformation
Puppet Camp Melbourne 2014:
1. I moved from managing 1 to
100 servers with Puppet
Eric Pizzani
The Australian National University
2. Quick Intro: Me
• Works in Canberra for the Australian National
University, originally from Melbourne.
• Responsible for the technical infrastructure of
ANU College of Asia and the Pacific’s web
presence.
3. Quick Intro: The College
• The college has roots dating back to 1946 as
the Universities’ Research School of Pacific
Studies
• 220 academic staff supported by 170
general staff
• 2,252 students with over 9,600 alumni
• Subjects from economics, political studies to
Asian languages
• Have more IP addresses than North Korea
4. Quick Intro: The College
More to the point…
• Hosts over 60 websites
• Average of five thousand visitors a day
• Peak of 100,000 on one night
• Running Drupal, Wordpress, and hand
crafted PHP
5. In the beginning…
• Small IT firm of 4 full time staff and a handful
of contractors
• Desktop support to system administration
• Configuration management was needed
6. In the beginning…
“Puppet sucks. Puppet is written in Ruby. Ruby
sucks.”
7. In the beginning…
“Puppet sucks. Puppet is written in Ruby. Ruby
sucks.”
– Eric Pizzani, 2009
19. ANU – ‘many’ years later
• Used pre-configured virtual appliances
• Low monthly fee gave you access to a wide
range of web applications- Wordpress,
OTRS, Drupal
• Simple to setup- Download the appliance, fill
in a few questions in a form and done.
• Updates were the same process
20. ANU – ‘many’ years later
• Used pre-configured virtual appliances
• Low monthly fee gave you access to a wide
range of web applications- Wordpress,
OTRS, Drupal
• Simple to setup- Download the appliance, fill
in a few questions in a web form and done.
• Updates were the same process
...in theory
22. What could go wrong?
• Mistakes and typos
• Steps forgotten
• Poor asset management
• Repeating the entire initial configuration
process every time you needed to update
was time consuming
23. What did go wrong?
• Custom configuration lost on upgrade or DR.
• Wordpress install inside VA provided
wordpress install.
• Files ended up in places the VA backup
service didn’t know about…
24. What else went wrong?
• DNS server addresses changed
• I would forget this important step
• Systems were frequently not put into Nagios
27. The Project
• Legacy Solaris Stack Decommissioning
– Management machine was a 1997 vintage Sun
Enterprise 450
– Web server was a 2003 vintage Sun Fire V440
– Custom complied Apache and PHP
– Non-existent documentation
– 1200 days uptime
– 40 websites and sub sites
36. How puppet helped?
• Quick site provisioning
– No messing and crafting vhosts by hand
• “Self” documentated
• Databases created and firewalls setup
37. Low hanging fruit
…or continuous improvement
• Improvements rolled out to all systems- new
and old
• Manual tasks no more!
• More monitoring checks!
38. Low hanging fruit
…or continuous improvement
• Improvements rolled out to all systems- new
and old
• Manual tasks no more!
• More monitoring checks!
39. Low hanging fruit
…or continuous improvement
• Improvements rolled out to all systems- new
and old
• Manual tasks no more!
• More monitoring checks!
40. Low hanging fruit
…or continuous improvement
• Improvements rolled out to all systems- new
and old
• Manual tasks no more!
• More monitoring checks!
• Auto-documentation
