Hi,

Luke asked me if I was willing to share what I am doing with the Puppet user community. So here goes:

I am using puppet to manage one host right now. While that isn't a good advertisement for Puppet's scaling capabilities, I find it interesting because I built my single node (personal mail, svn, ci and web server) with puppet where I could (clearly there was some bootstrapping going on). So I started with a VPS that was Debian stable, installed Puppet (had to download some packages by hand from unstable, etc.) I keep all the config under source control and use puppet to ship that to the machine. I probably complicated things for myself by having the Puppet managed node and Puppetmaster on the same host, but them's the breaks. I could probably distill my config down now that I have learned more about Puppet, and now that the tool has moved on.

I also use Cruise Control[1] to hook up Subversion and Puppet: Changes get detected in Cruise, a rake[2] script runs some tests on my config[3], and then makes the updated configs available to Puppetmaster. Cruisecontrol acts like a change aware cron daemon, but it also publishes changes - in a software development context this will alert the team immediately to integration issues, but using it to notify people about infrastructure changes or config issues seemed to me like a good idea.

I'm using a Java based CruiseControl service but I plan to adopt a ruby based tool[4] as that would make the rest of my toolset Ruby-based (apart from Svn, etc:).

I'm presenting this concept in more detail at a Unix conference in the UK this month, so I'd be interested in your feedback or questions: if you think it's great or insane, and why.

Best

Julian

[1] http://cruisecontrol.sourceforge.net/ [2] http://rubyforge.org/projects/rake/ [3] http://mail.madstop.com/pipermail/puppet-users/2007-February/001471.html [4] http://rossniemi.wordpress.com/2007/02/28/a-comparison-of-continuous-integration-tools-for-ruby-on-rails/