Redhat application deployment automaton with Puppet module and F5

I have found this youtube video [1] on the the Puppet channel. It is an interesting presentation about the day to day issues the folks from Redhat run into when developing, managing and deploying new code for customer facing sites they host.

On of the things they mention that was difficult for them and why the started this project were:

• Lack of a cross functional team who could understand the whole architecture.
• People tend to have a limited understanding of other areas that they don't work in; Examples are SysAdmin about NetAdmin, NetAdmin about Develpers etc.
• On new depoyment a difficulties to find a team/person who can take an ownership of an issue as the problem may be above the area of their own expertise.
• Diverse and inconsistencies dev, staging and production systems.

To solve the problem they decided to refactor the architecture and automate as much as it was possible. The video [1] shows what issues they run into and how they solved it with a help of Puppet module they created and the F5 load balancer.

In short a message they convey in the presentation is: automate, standardize, and automate once again.

References

1. Managing F5 LTM with Puppet - Matthew Carpenter and Bret McMillan of Red Hat
2. http://www.youtube.com/user/PuppetLabsInc