Open Source For You — December 2017

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50 | DECEMBER 2017 | OPEN SOURCE FOR YOU | http://www.OpenSourceForU.com

T

he burgeoning demand for scalability has driven

technology into a new era with a focus on distributed

and virtual resources, as opposed to the conventional

hardware that drives most systems today. Virtualisation is

a method for logically dividing the computing resources

for a system between different applications. Tools offer

either full virtualisation or para-virtualisation for a system,

driving away from the ‘one server one application’ model

that typically under-utilises resources, towards a model

that is focused on more efficient use of the system. In

hardware virtualisation, a virtual machine gets created and

behaves like a real computer with an operating system. The

terminology, ‘host’ and ‘guest’ machine, is utilised for the

real and virtual system respectively. With this paradigm

shift, software and service architectures have undergone a

transition to virtual machines, laying the groundwork for

distributed and cloud computing.

Enterprise infrastructure

The classical definition of enterprise infrastructure — the

data centre, a crucial piece of the puzzle serving to bolster

As a server configuration management tool, Puppet offers an automated way to

inspect, deliver and operate software regardless of its deployment. It provides

control and enforces consistency, while allowing for any of the modifications

dictated by business needs.

the operations of the company — is evolving in a manner

that would have been hard to fathom a decade ago. It

was originally built as isolated chunks of machinery

pieced together into a giant to provide storage and

network support for day-to-day operations. Archetypal

representations include a mass of tangled wires and rolled

up cables connecting monster racks of servers churning

data minute after minute. A few decades ago, this was the

norm; today companies require much more flexibility, to

scale up and down!

With the advent of virtualisation, enterprise infrastructure

has been cut down, eliminating unnecessary pieces of

hardware, and managers have opted for a cloud storage

network that they can scale on-the-fly. Today, the business

of cloud service providers is booming because not only

startups but corporations, too, are switching to a virtual

internal infrastructure to avoid the hassles of preparing and

maintaining their own set of servers, especially considering

the man hours required for the task. Former US Chief

Information Officer (CIO) Vivek Kundra’s paper on Federal

Cloud Computing, states: “It allows users to control the

A Brief Introduction to

Puppet