Republic Polytechnic Slashed Configuration Time from 2 Hours to 15 Minutes with Puppet
Established in 2002, Republic Polytechnic is the first higher education institution in Singapore to leverage a problem-based learning approach for all its diploma programs. Republic Polytechnic has seven schools and one academic center offering 37 full-time diplomas in Applied Science, Engineering, Management and Communication, Hospitality, Infocomm, Sports, Health & Leisure, and Technology for the Arts.
Benefits of Using Puppet:
Reduced from 4 hours to 10 minutes
in lab setup time
2 daily hours reduced to 15 minutes
for desktop configuration
Relieved strain
on the entire IT Services team
Challenge: Time-Consuming Manual Configurations
Republic Polytechnic’s School of Infocomm offers educational programs and executive courses for working professionals, with real-world examples to augment lesson delivery. Each student has access to their own learning compute environment. Because students rely on simulation of actual scenarios, delivering these lab environments every day without errors is critical to support the school's lesson plan and learning outcomes.
Manual configuration of these essential resources was time-consuming, error-prone, and required significant staff hours. The school’s infrastructure support team sought out automation tools to reduce the time spent deploying them every day.
Solution: Relieved Resources and Faster Deployment
To address these challenges, Republic Polytechnic combined Bolt and Puppet Enterprise for infrastructure automation, using Puppet in a monolithic setup integrated with GitLab. Routine scripts were run with Bolt to be rolled into Puppet tasks for streamlined daily workloads, which created uniformity across machines, redirected efforts spent correcting manual errors, and allowed the team to effectively manage its deployment of resources.
The school used Puppet for its resource abstraction layer to move to a common platform using a single programming language, meaning it's accessible to the school's support team, instructors, and students alike. With Puppet’s human-readable language, also known as Puppet DSL, they achieved a uniform and structured platform that offered simple adoption and implementation.
Now, repetitive tasks that initially required knowledge of Linux commands by trained system administrators could be delegated to any of the IT Services staff through the Puppet Enterprise console, saving resources and decreasing response time.
Gaining Back Valuable Time
Puppet Enterprise was able to assist with providing quick configurations on a regular basis so that the school’s technical support team could spend more time innovating and less time addressing break-fix issues.
As an example, one of the student firewall courses required 20 firewalls to be configured uniformly and correctly, only to be reset after the daily classes. Using the officially supported Firewall module for Puppet, results are guaranteed to be correct and configuration time dropped from 2 hours to 15 minutes for all the firewalls. This gives back time so that the technical support team can assist other team members.
See for yourself how Puppet can speed up delivery across your organization while maximizing your resources. Try it today or request a demo with the Puppet team.