“I would like to start using a configuration management tool like Puppet, but I don’t know how my system is configured!” In the era before configuration management tools, most systems would be built by hand. Command by command the system would be configured. If the sysadmin would spot a problem, he would fix it immediately. Change after change, this process would continue. Resulting in a running system but with a configuration that’s is not fully known and definitely not repeatable. In this blog article, we are going to show you how Puppet can not only manage your configuration, but also help you to get to know all the details of your configuration.

In this picture, we have drawn a High-Available setup for a WebLogic and Oracle system. Most larger enterprises use a setup like this for their production environment. But it is needlessly costly and resource hungry when you provide this setup for simple, functional tests. Or even worse, provide your developers with this setup. What if we could use the same Puppet code to install and manage the application setup on both this High-Available setup and all the other setups. This blog post shows you how to use Puppet roles and profiles to do just that.

Without any tools, the installation and configuration of a WebLogic infrastructure is a big and complex task. Fortunately, our WebLogic installation and configuration modules make the task automatable and repeatable. But we know from our customers, that without any guidelines, it is still difficult to get started. There is so much to configure and so much install that it is hard to figure out where to start. To help you, we have implemented some extensive examples. In this blog post, I’m going to take you trough the setup we have made for a basic WebLogic installation.

Puppet is going strong. This year, Puppetconf in Portland was bigger and better than before. Slowly but surely, Puppet is also entering the large enterprises. More and more large enterprise customers recognise the need for the consistent and fast deployment of systems and application. More and more large enterprise customers value the strengths that Puppet and the Puppet ecosystem bring, but more and more, the big enterprise customers also see the parts that are missing to make them happy.