CloudTweaks.com posted an article today that identified Puppet as one of the top 11 open source resources for cloud computing. The article originally appeared in GigaOM.
Puppet was specifically named because of Puppet’s strength in managing large numbers of machines and virtual machines:
Virtual servers are on the rise in cloud computing deployments, and Reductive Labs’ open-source software, built upon the legacy of the Cfengine system, is hugely respected by many system administrators for managing them. You can use it to manage large numbers of systems or virtual machines through automated routines, without having to do a lot of complex scripting.
Our community continues to use Puppet in a variety of ways to accomplish difficult tasks, whether that is managing virtual machines in the cloud, meeting security compliance requirements, or managing their corporate Mac OS X resources.
Isn’t puppet using too much memory for virtualisation? Reports show that puppetmaster use gigabytes (!) http://bit.ly/a3EhU3
That should be read more correctly as Puppet *can* use GB of memory, as can, unfortunately, almost any Ruby process, because of Ruby’s memory collection.
This is why it’s become best practice to use Passenger with essentially any Ruby system – because the processes are short-lived, their memory consumption can never grow too much.
Given the fact that lots and lots of people are, in fact, using Puppet on virtualized servers, it’s clearly not inappropriate.