Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP) 2012

Managing a site with Puppet

22 May 2012, 13:30

4h 45m

Rosenthal Pavilion (10th floor) (Kimmel Center)

Poster Computer Facilities, Production Grids and Networking (track 4) Poster Session

Speaker

Dr Xavier Espinal Curull (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ES))

Description

Installation and post-installation mechanisms are critical points for the computing centres to streamline production services. Managing hundreds of nodes is a challenge for any computing centre and there are many tools able to cope with this problem. The desired features includes the ability to do incremental configuration (no need to bootstrap the service to make it manageable by the tool), simplicity in the description language for the configurations and in the system itself, ease of extension of the properties/capabilities of the system, a rich community for assistance and development, and open-source software. A possible choice to steer post-installations and dynamic post-configurations is Puppet. Puppet is a central point where profiles can be defined, those can easily be propagated around the cluster hence fulfilling the necessities of post-install configurations after the raw Operating System installation. Puppet also ensures the enforcement of the profile and the defined services once has been completely installed. We found in puppet a correct trade-off among simplicity and flexibility, and it was the most fitting to our requirements. Puppet approach to system management is simplistic, non-intrusive and incremental; puppet do not try to control every aspect of the configuration but only the ones you are interested in. Allows to manage a whole site from a central service, easing a lot potential reconfiguration or speeding up disaster recovery procedures.