Puppet
Puppet, an automated administrative engine, performs
administrative tasks (such as adding users,
installing packages, and updating server configurations) based on a
centralized specification.
The software allows system administrators to centrally manage
every
important aspect of a system using a cross-platform specification
language that manages
all the separate elements normally aggregated in different files, like
users, cron jobs, and hosts, along with obviously discrete elements
like packages, services, and files.
Puppet's simple declarative specification language provides
powerful
classing abilities for drawing out the similarities between hosts while
allowing them to be as specific as necessary, and it handles dependency
and prerequisite relationships between objects clearly and explicitly.
The primary design goal of Puppet is that it has an
expressive enough language backed by a powerful enough library that you
can write your own server automation applications in just a few lines
of code.
Puppet could be said to be the next-generation cfengine. The
overall
design is heavily influenced by Cfengine,
but the language is more
powerful than Cfengine's
and the library is more flexible.
Features include:
- Custom declarative language to describe system
configuration
- Manages any type of machine including workstations
- Helps reduce your overheads
- Powerful, flexible and extensible
- Puppet uses Facter, a system assay tool
- Reproduce any configuration on any number of additional
systems
- Built-in facilities known as classes
- Uses a client / server model
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Last Updated Sunday, March 18 2012 @ 07:30 AM EST
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