A large enterprise in the transporation industry with approximately 3,000 employees and around 700 servers faced significant challenges in managing its growing IT infrastructure. The company operated in a highly regulated industry, which required stringent security controls and consistent compliance across a mixed environment of Windows and Linux servers.
Challenges
As the company expanded, it encountered several critical issues:
- Consistent Security Configurations: Ensuring that all servers maintained secure and consistent configurations across both operating systems became increasingly difficult, especially as the server count grew.
- Change Detection: The company needed a reliable way to ensure that no unauthorized changes were made to their configurations, which could potentially compromise security or lead to compliance violations.
- Audit Trail: It was essential to have a clear audit trail that tracked all configuration changes, identifying who made the changes and when they occurred.
- Unified Management: With a mix of Windows and Linux servers, the company preferred a single tool that could effectively manage the entire infrastructure, simplifying operations and reducing the complexity of their IT environment.
Solution Evaluation
The company initially evaluated several configuration management tools, including Chef, Ansible, and Puppet.
- Chef: While Chef offered robust features, the team found it required more customization and had a steeper learning curve compared to other options.
- Ansible: Ansible was also considered due to its simplicity and ease of use. However, it lacked certain critical features, particularly around ensuring there was no configuration drift over time.
Ultimately, the company selected Puppet Enterprise due to its large ecosystem of pre-built modules and its advanced capabilities for preventing configuration drift, ensuring that configurations remained consistent and secure across all servers.
Implementation
The implementation of Puppet Enterprise involved several key steps:
- Centralized Change Management: All configuration changes were stored in Git, providing a complete history of who made changes, what changes were made, and when they occurred.
- Continuous Configuration Enforcement: Puppet continuously applied and enforced the desired configurations across all servers. It reported back to a central server, allowing the IT team to monitor and audit any changes.
- Proactive Monitoring: Puppet flagged any configuration changes that did not correlate with an approved change in source control. These unauthorized changes were immediately raised to the infrastructure team for review, ensuring that no security breaches or compliance issues occurred.
Impact
- Scalability: Puppet Enterprise enabled the company to scale rapidly, doubling its server count and driving significant revenue growth, all while only modestly expanding the infrastructure team. This high level of efficiency allowed the company to handle its increasing demands without compromising operational stability.
- Compliance: Achieving and maintaining PCI and SOX compliance became much simpler with Puppet Enterprise. The tool’s robust change tracking and reporting capabilities made audits more efficient, reducing the time and effort required from the infrastructure teams. This allowed them to focus on more strategic initiatives rather than being bogged down by compliance tasks.
- Efficiency in Deployment: By leveraging Git branches, the company could easily test and approve changes before deploying them to production servers. This streamlined process allowed even large-scale changes to be rolled out to hundreds of servers within just 20 minutes—a task that previously would have taken several days to complete.
Conclusion
By choosing Puppet Enterprise, the company was able to streamline its IT operations, enhance security, and maintain compliance across a complex and growing infrastructure. This case study demonstrates how the right tools and strategies can support both growth and operational excellence, making it an excellent example for other organizations facing similar challenges.