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- Introduce Puppet the company.
- Give an overview of the Puppet portfolio of products.
- Describe Bolt.
Now that you've been introduced to the Quest Guide for the Learning VM, this lesson introduces Puppet the company and its portfolio of products.
Puppet was founded in 2005 by Luke Kanies and has offered its first commercial product, Puppet Enterprise (PE), since 2011.
Puppet is a global company with headquarters in Portland and worldwide offices located in London, Belfast, Sydney, Singapore, and elsewhere. The company has over 1000 enterprise customers, including 75 of the Fortune 100. Puppet has a robust user community that has built many thousands of contributed modules comprising over 7.5M lines of code. Additionally, tens of thousands of organizations use open-source Puppet to manage their server infrastructure.
Over time, the company has expanded its offerings to include a range of both enterprise and open source products. The focus of the Learning VM will be on two of these products, Bolt and Puppet Enterprise. We invite you to visit https://puppet.com/products for additional information on the entire suite of Puppet products.
Bolt is an open-source remote task runner that automates the manual work that you do to maintain your infrastructure. Use Bolt to automate tasks that you need to perform on your infrastructure on an ad hoc basis, such as troubleshooting, deploying an application, stopping and starting services, and upgrading a database schema. Bolt connects directly to remote nodes with SSH or WinRM, so you are not required to install any agent software.
In the Learning VM, Bolt will be installed and used to install the Puppet agent on a target node much like you would do as you begin to deploy Puppet on your infrastructure. Think of using Bolt as the first step of your infrastructure automation journey. It can easily leverage existing scripts that you have written in any language and allow you to execute them on remote nodes in parallel.
Over time, you can then convert configuration tasks to Puppet code for long-term management of your infrastructure. Even in that scenario, Bolt is a powerful tool for performing tasks that are not as easily done with the Puppet agent, such as stopping a database server, performing a schema upgrade, and restarting the server.
In this quest, we introduced you to Puppet the company and its portfolio of products. In the Learning VM, we will focus on the use of Bolt and Puppet Enterprise to show how straightforward it is to begin your infrastructure automation journey.