Use configuration management tools to optimize server-to-personnel ratios

Configuration Management and automation tools such as Puppet and Opscode Chef are generated for large cloud computing and Web 2.0 organizations. Google used to be a Puppet user, and Opscode also has customers such as the Evite website.

I'm afraid not many enterprise IT users are as large as Google, but they also agree that configuration management tools can save their time and cost.

Ed Bailey, IT architect at a large credit board, used Puppet four years ago to manage an independent sensitive file in hundreds of Linux Hosts. His team also considered tools like BladeLogic, which is now part of the BMC Software Company's Automation Suite, but later canceled the plan because of cost and execution time issues.

Bailey said: with this level of enterprise software, it takes several years and millions of dollars to complete all the transactions on the right track.

"Three to six months of trial use, three months of procurement, three months of planning, and professional services," he said with regret. After all this is done, you have to spend one or a half year to have a complete work system ."

At the same time, his team was able to get Puppet products within six weeks, first managed a separate file, and then gradually expanded the configuration. Currently, Bailey estimates that almost 90% of the enterprise environment is "Puppet. He currently uses Puppet to automate migration from HP BladeSystem servers to Cisco UCS. "You only need to load the operating system, and then Puppet will be responsible ."

Optimize the server-System Administrator Rate

At Bailey's workstation, the progress of Puppet is slow and steady, but the cost is efficient. The server-Administrator ratio of the IT department is 250: 1, and its parent company is 35: 1. Assume that you need to spend $0.1 million a year on a skilled Linux administrator. If you want to automate their work structure through Puppet, so Bailey's company can save $1 million to $1.5 million in System Administrator salaries each year.

However, Puppet fails to enter his workstation because the management has a prejudice against non-enterprise open-source software.

"Puppet does not look like enterprise software," he said ." The company's review department first regards it as an internal development system that sounds very friendly to the people.

Puppet Labs is the developer of the software and is committed to improving the attractiveness of the software to enterprise workstations. Puppet Enterprise 2.0 was released last week, adding graphical user control, new capabilities for VMware and Amazon EC2 cloud services, and business processes and baselines.

From script to planning

Bailey and his team did not choose other open-source configuration management tools, including the well-evaluated CFEngine, which mainly supports the management of Unix and Linux systems). "This is not a real framework, it is the transmission device of the script."

A few years ago, Bailey also tried Opscode Chef, but he still felt that Puppet was suitable.

"In terms of technology, Chef is more suitable for programmers, but not for us, because we are not so good programmers, we only need to be able to quickly deploy the tools that work ."

However, Chef users warned that using a non-programming tool mentality for configuration management may aggravate users' weakness.

Chris Williams is the co-founder of the online book rental website BookRenter.com, which uses Opscode Chef. As a former programmer, Chris said: "I feel like I can't do anything in non-programming software ." This is not true for operators with limited programming skills, but Chris thinks this will limit their ability to work in the future.

Looking at automated IT operations from a more developmental perspective is Chris's central idea of the "DevOps" phenomenon today. DevOps is committed to improving the delivery of applications in various departments, and blurring the gap between developers and operation teams. Configuration Management and automation tools are the support power of DevOps practitioners.

Therefore, IT organizations that want to adopt more DevOps ideas should encourage system administrators to improve programming technology, said Rohit Amarnath, chief technology leader of Full 360. Their company uses Chef to deliver and manage cloud computing-based intelligent business platforms.

Amarnath stressed: "Even if you don't learn something as simple as the Ruby language, you may not be able to do well ." On the other hand, the automation of configuration management tasks is not complicated at the beginning. Under the DevOps principle, "system administrators must at least learn the basics and observe configuration management from a language-centric perspective ."