Cool stuff to look out for: Puppet and Vagrant

A while ago my ex-colleague sent me a blog about a guy who started a company and started out by setting up his OTAP environment using Puppet and Vagrant. Let's quickly look at what these projects are:

Puppet

"Puppet Enterprise is IT automation software that gives system administrators the power to easily automate repetitive tasks, quickly deploy critical applications, and proactively manage infrastructure, on-premises or in the cloud." - https://puppetlabs.com/puppet/puppet-enterprise/

So it's a piece of software that lets you control 'the state of resources' on your 'nodes', which will probably VMs. You can see in the video's that a puppet master ( a box that controls the puppet boxes ) uses a configuration file to set the box's network config ( IP stuff ) and for instance the installed mods ( LAMP, node and/or other db engines).

Vagrant

"Vagrant provides easy to configure, reproducible, and portable work environments built on top of industry-standard technology and controlled by a single consistent workflow to help maximize the productivity and flexibility of you and your team. To achieve its magic, Vagrant stands on the shoulders of giants. Machines are provisioned on top of VirtualBox, VMware, AWS, or any other provider. Then, industry-standard provisioning tools such as shell scripts, Chef, or Puppet, can be used to automatically install and configure software on the machine." - http://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/why-vagrant/index.html

The way these things come together is that you can script the creation of one ( or a WHOLE lot ) of VMs and then configure them using puppet to either take on a certain role ( test your load balancing for instance ) or make them perform a certain task.

Really awesome stuff if you ask me. Things like that should be possible with Windows Azure I suppose, so I need to get up to speed with that stuff too.