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Life cycle management with Foreman and Puppet
Building Helpers
The open source community offers two projects for routine administrative tasks that complement each other perfectly: Puppet and Foreman. Puppet [1] is an open source configuration management toolset and framework written in Ruby for the management and configuration of servers, whereas Foreman [2] is a lifecycle management tool.
Puppet
Puppet gives admins an approach to installing and configuring additional software that is relatively independent of the underlying operating system. The supported operating systems are the most popular Linux distributions, Unix, and now also Windows.
A typical Puppet environment comprises a master (server) and one or more agents (clients). Communication between the master and agent is secured with self-signed SSL certificates. The master stores a manifest that describes the role and the target state of the client. A target state would be, for example, "web server with PHP and local users with SSH keys." The manifest can be written in a domain-specific language (DSL).
Additionally, Facter [3] runs on the client. Facter collects information about the system and forwards it to the Puppet master when Puppet runs. On the basis of collected facts, the master can generate a dynamic catalog from the pre-defined manifest. In turn, the catalog is executed on the agent, which issues the correct commands based on the Facter information. Facter collects many facts about the operating system, hardware, software, network, and so on. If you need more information, you can define custom facts. For example, if you want to install Apache2 as a web server, an excerpt from the manifest looks like this:
package { "apache2" :
ensure => "installed",
...
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