Why Move from Open Source Puppet to Puppet Enterprise
Considering moving from open source Puppet to Puppet Enterprise? Start here.
Table of Contents
- Why Move from OSP to PE?
- How Does Puppet Enterprise Drive Time to Value?
- Why Blue Shield of California Moved from Open Source Puppet to Puppet Enterprise
As more and more businesses are moving from Open Source Puppet (OSP) to Puppet Enterprise (PE), they are experiencing multiple benefits. In this blog series, we’re exploring the biggest benefits we hear from customers about their experience moving from OSP to PE.
One of the most common questions we get is: Is PE just OSP with GUI and support? The answer is no. PE provides more extensive features and benefits to your team and your company, leading many customers to share they wish they’d moved to PE sooner.
Before we move into the first benefit we’re exploring in this blog, let’s look at why customers move to PE.
Why Move from OSP to PE?
Customers that choose PE are growing quickly, need to scale, have outgrown open source capabilities, and are serious about driving automation across their enterprise. They need Puppet to do more for them, with more automation and less work on their part. Some of the most common reasons customers choose PE include:
- Time to Value: Enterprises are moving faster than ever and need to be able to immediately experience the benefits Puppet Enterprise delivers.
- Scaling Success: Businesses can’t wait for the manual work required for open source solutions and need to be able to automate scalability.
- Interoperability: With more APIs and third parties needed to support enterprise success, making sure systems and applications work seamlessly is more important than ever.
- Business Continuity: Knowing Puppet Enterprise is backed by professional services and support creates peace of mind for disaster recovery.
How Does Puppet Enterprise Drive Time to Value?
1. Ease of use The Puppet Enterprise GUI provides better ways to manage your infrastructure with far more visibility and control, provides a single source of truth, and lets you leverage node groups. You can easily track changes across your infrastructure, create node groups for assigning Puppet code to them, and build a repository of all software installed on your systems.
2. Simplified installation You can install all PE infrastructure on a single node to get started. From here, you can scale up to a large or extra-large installation as your infrastructure grows, which lets you plan how you want to grow your Puppet infrastructure.
3. Upgrades Get access to the latest PE features with simplified upgrades. Upgrades are a core aspect of expanding the use cases of Puppet across your organization, helping you derive further value from the PE tooling.
4. Scale your scripts With PE Tasks & Plans, you can leverage content your organization already uses for ad hoc management of your infrastructure. Tasks & Plans allows you to scale the use of these scripts by implementing guardrails such as input validation and descriptions.
5. Complex orchestrationPE Plans help you tie together tasks, scripts, commands, and plans (yes, plans in plans!) to create complex workflows with refined access controls.
6. Consistent management of infrastructure With the Orchestrator service, you can execute PE Tasks & Plans whenever you need them, without your team reinventing the wheel each time. Eliminate manual work, reduce human error and gain consistency and control of the management of your infrastructure from a centralized location.
7. Conduct efficient patch management PE Patch Management gives you a single, simplified automated patching workflow, directly from the PE console, eliminating tool sprawl and manual processes.
8. Maintain healthy hosts with a single interface You can ensure systems are healthy by using one simplified view and detailed reporting. Patches and updates can be applied on an ongoing basis with automated workflows that patch, update, and reboot systems on a scheduled basis.
9. Stay compliant and patch with confidence PE also lets you prove compliance and confirm systems are up-to-date with detailed reporting that gives you clear visibility into all systems and changes. Apply security patches across both Linux and Windows systems in a standardized manner.
All of these enable you to quickly experience time to value when you move to Puppet Enterprise. The automation, standardization, and centralized visibility immediately free your team to focus on the issues that truly move your business forward — giving your enterprise the support and confidence it needs to scale, speed up, and leverage market opportunities.
What does this look like in real life?
Why Blue Shield of California Moved from Open Source Puppet to Puppet Enterprise
Blue Shield of California services 4.5 million health plan members and more than 65,000 physicians across the state. In 2016, Blue Shield deployed Open Source Puppet (OSP) for lifecycle and configuration management, focusing first on monolithic applications then building out the Puppet footprint and automating applications.
As the OSP environment grew to include numerous developer teams, the core team spent more time on maintenance and managing code. They decided to implement Puppet Enterprise (PE) to get the support services that would bring the value they needed to speed up automation and free up developers to focus on shipping code.
With Puppet, the team now has better visibility into their managed infrastructure and by adding Continuous Delivery for Puppet Enterprise, they’ve scaled their workflows to enable broader teams to promote their own code and work in the system, delivering business value more swiftly than ever before.
Stay tuned for our next blog in our open source Puppet series in which we’ll explore the benefits of scaling success.
Further Reading on OSP to PE
- For more details, download the free ebook A Business Guide to Open Source Puppet vs. Enterprise.
- Get a quick look at the differences between OSP and PE.
- Want to see the PE features discussed here in action? View a product demo of these features.
- Learn about the Puppet Enterprise Long-Term Support (LTS) release for security.
- Puppet migration services: Move to Puppet Enterprise with ease.
