EMC is heading to Portland this week for the Puppet Conference.  What’s up with that?
Well…you’re building and managing your applications and operating system instances using Puppet, right…now what?  That in itself is a win for the IT teams that used to have to hand-deploy new servers and applications.  No more “snowflake” deployments, right?  With the power and versatility that you get from Puppet, your servers get deployed the right way, every time…and get updated easily from the central repository.  That’s the Puppet story.

So, what does that have to do with EMC?  That’s a great question.

EMC, through the integration with VMware vRealize Orchestrator, offers a simple self-service portal that IT can populate with all of the applications and operating systems that Puppet is managing.  The means that your cloud users/business users can deploy applications from a central portal, and leverage all the Puppet application definitions, with some added policy and governance wrapped around them.
See, end users don’t usually have the ability to deploy applications from a Puppet server on their own.  They need help from IT to deploy a server, to install the OS, and then to install the Puppet agents, sign the Puppet cert, and then assign the application classes from the Puppet console.  That’s alot of work.  EMC automates that.

Using the self-service portal and the catalog of services, IT can create a blueprint for users to deploy your Puppet applications.  What’s in a blueprint?

• Definition of the vSphere template to use when deploying the new virtual machine
• Definition of the Puppet classes or node groups to associate with
• Attached workflows to…
  • Install the Puppet Agent from the Puppet Master
  • Register and sign the new virtual machine with the Puppet Master
  • Clean up when the virtual machine is de-provisioned from the hybrid cloud
• Selections to assign Backup, Replication, and CA workload protection
• Entitlement and Approval polices to ensure users only deploy apps that they are entitled to

Once you have your blueprint published in the service catalog, then your users can deploy the apps through a simple request.  When they deploy the application, the orchestration kicks in automatically during that process.

As you make changes to your application definitions and configurations in the Puppet master, those changes propagate out to the managed servers just as you’d expect.

And to close the loop on the lifecycle management process, when the cloud user deletes that virtual server, another workflow kicks in and removes that system’s cert from the Puppet master.  Love it when orchestration cleans up after itself!

It’s not enough to just TALK about this cool integration…

The EMC teams are also ready to help you get this vision going into practice.  Many organizations love the idea of config management with Puppet…why not?  But finding people to help architect and implement the solution is turning out to be a challenge.  Config management is a growing skill-set and can be hard to find experienced help.

Beyond just getting your Puppet infrastructure and processes in place is the development of a full DevOps model for your organization.  How are you going to streamline the application development and deployment process, integrating Puppet into the middle of this process?

Whether you need to start from scratch, or need some help creating the application definitions, or a full app lifecycle transformation, EMC has a group within our services org that specializes in IT and Development transformation.

Contributing To The Community

EMC also offers several products via the Puppet Forge.

 

 

VCE offers a module that enables management of a Vblock converged infrastructure solution

Where to see EMC at #puppetconf…

EMC Booth

Come talk to us at the EMC Booth and you could also win a DJI Phantom 2 Vision Quadcopter – aka…really cool drone

The booth is right at the front door to the Exhibit hall…can’t miss it.

Infrastructure as Code – Ban Snowflake Deployments

Manually configuring infrastructure such as servers, network and storage will lead to “snowflake” deployments and failures that could have otherwise been avoided. How are your apps supposed to live and run safely on this house of cards? In this session we’ll do LIVE DEMOS of how you can get rid of those worries by deploying, configuring and managing your infrastructure and applications in an automated way with DevOps-style components.

Presenter:  Jim Sanzone, Director of Tech Marketing for EMC Cloud Solutions

10/9 12:45-1:15 in the EXPO HALL THEATRE

PUPPET LABS IT Leader Breakout:  Partner Ecosystem

Topics to be discussed:  EMC Hybrid Cloud, DevOps, & Puppet alliances

Speakers planned for this session…

• Dan Mitchell, EMC
• Angel Calvo, Microsoft
• Chris Wells, Red Hat
• Mike Coleman, Docker

10/8 4:45 – 5:30 Location TBD

This event will also be LIVESTREAMED!  Check it out at: http://info.puppetlabs.com/PuppetConf2015LiveStream.html

EMC Sponsored Lunch

How Enterprise DevOps with Engineered Solutions Help Solve Portfolio Dependency Hell

Discuss with EMC and your peers how engineered DevOps solutions accelerate creating a converged tooling platform to unwind technical debt in enterprise portfolios preventing velocity at scale.

Presenters:

• Daniel Mitchell, EMC Cloud Solutions Business Development Manager
• Michael S. Wagner, EMC DevOps Discipline Lead

10/9 12:00-1:30 @ Room B110-111

This event is by RSVP (First Come, First Served) and here’s the link to register:  http://bit.ly/EMCLunch

Want to find some time to talk directly with our onsite team?

Shoot an email directly to Christina Failma (christina.failma@emc.com) and she’ll get you setup on our schedule and get you connected to the right members of our team.

Want to see the rest of the activity…here’s a great link on the EMC Community!

http://bit.ly/PuppetConf15