When you think about cloud management and automation solution, what are some of key asks come to your mind? I bet, there are many – provisioning, policies, lifecycle management to name a few. Today we are going to talk more in detail about asks around OS / middleware configuration, application services management, and drift remediation. Yes, you guessed it right! We are going to talk about vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) and Puppet integration. As we all know, vCAC provides a variety of different mechanisms to build, deploy, and configure applications over various private and public clouds. Puppet is quite popular in the realm of configuration management tools, which excel in area of OS/middleware configuration. We started integrating vCAC and Puppet together couple of years back with vCAC version 6.0 and we are taking it further with our latest release 6.1.
As you may already know, in vCAC 6.0, we have Puppet integration at blueprint creation level as well as at the orchestration level. You can drag and drop different Puppet modules when you are creating application blueprints in vCAC blueprint designer which is shown in the image below. For example, you want to use Puppet module to configure your MySQL server, what you have to do is just drag and drop a Puppet MySQL module on a database server component in blueprint designer. When you are done modeling and deploy that blueprint, vCAC automatically does runtime orchestration between other components and Puppet modules.
That’s enough of talk about 6.0. I want to tell you more about exciting things we have done in 6.1. We are taking existing capabilities around Puppet integration even further in vCAC 6.1. You can now perform more lifecycle operations after deployment of blueprint. Newly added lifecycle operations in 6.1 are update/rollback, scale out / scale in, and teardown! These additional capabilities are immensely helpful when you need modifications in existing deployments.
Some of our customers who have windows environment were bummed after 6.0 release since at that time we didn’t have support for deploying windows configurations via Puppet. Cheer up! You can now deploy windows configuration with our latest 6.1 release.
That’s not the end! Last but not the least, you can now modify those puppet master configurations and agent run intervals right inside new vCAC UI! So, if you want that drift detection / remediation to happen every ten minutes, just modify Puppet agent run interval in vCAC itself. A picture is worth thousand words, so here is a quick summary of our enhancements related with Puppet integration in vCAC 6.1.
Moving forward, we are planning to take integrations with Puppet to higher levels, but for that, we need your help! Please let us know more about what you would like to see on this front in comments below (psssst shouting in comments area is totally fine btw)
