1. puppet
labs Case Study
“Collaborating with the Puppet
community at Puppet Camp helped
our team get up to speed on Puppet as a
core component of their infrastructure
management capabilities. The Puppet
PUPPET HELPS CLICKABILITY
Master Training provided by Puppet
Labs was reasonably priced, and greatly
DRAMATICALLY
increased the value we have gained from
implementing Puppet at Clickability.”
- Tom Cignarella, Vice President of Technical
Operations & Support, Clickability INCREASE THEIR SPEED
OF DEPLOYMENT AND
ENSURE CONSISTENCY
ACROSS ALL SERVERS
INDUSTRY:
Web Software
CHALLENGE:
Configuration consistency Clickability is the global leader in on-demand Web Content Management.
They provide the market’s only Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform that
SOLUTION: combines Web Content Management with world class website delivery
Puppet & Puppet Training infrastructure to host and manage websites for large enterprise customers
such as NetApp and media companies like PR Newswire and the Minneapolis
RESULTS: Star Tribune. Delivering and powering hundreds of customer sites, Clickability’s
Faster deployment, improved
top priority is to make sure their services are secure with a high degree of
troubleshooting, rapid system changes
scalability and reliability.
STARTING ENVIRONMENT KEY OBJECTIVES
• The technical operations team at Clickability is responsible for • Scalability and Reliability – Ensure a highly
the entirety of Clickability’s production web infrastructure and reliable and scalable environment for the
operations. They run web servers and support applications that technical operations team to quickly build,
power hundreds of websites, manage databases, ensure security, and manage, and make changes to their servers.
provide capacity planning for over 300 servers split between two • System Consistency – Provide a consistent, clean
data centers. environment for the technical operations team to
• The technical operations team supports the Clickability Platform, deploy applications, add capacity, and architect
which is built on the company’s own java-based application. The new SaaS services.
underlying IT infrastructure is primarily based on open source • Increase Technical Capabilities – Growing from
technology (Linux, MySQL, Apache, Tomcat, etc.). one to two data centers, Clickability needed to
• As a SaaS company, they are a true multi-tenant environment. They step up its internal technical capabilities. They
have hundreds of customers and many thousands of users that all chose Puppet as a tool to rebuild their data center
share the same infrastructure and supporting applications. architecture and manage all server configurations,
• Always playing catch up and fixing the problem of the moment, including web servers, application servers,
Clickability required a configuration management solution that databases.
could quickly build machines and ensure their systems were running
exactly the same configuration at all times.

2. puppet
labs Case Study
“When building out our
second data center, it took us
a lot more time to un-box and
BENEFITS OBTAINED
rack the servers than it did • Speed of Deployment – Puppet has enabled Clickability to improve their speed of
to configure and build them. deployment. For example, when they deployed four blade centers, the 94 individual
With Puppet, we had them up servers were completely built and ready for production in 20 minutes. With Puppet,
and running within minutes building servers went from taking days to minutes to complete.
of being powered up and • Consistency of Servers – Puppet allowed Clickability to go from an inconsistent
on the network. In building environment to a predictable homogeneous environment. The ability to make rapid
out our infrastructure, we’ve changes and upgrades simultaneously on hundreds of servers ensured consistency
gone from a manual, time across the data centers.
consuming, error prone
• Improved Troubleshooting – The consistent environment ensured by Puppet meant
process, to a best-case scenario
that trouble shooting problems became more effective and more efficient. With a
of full automation. This is a
consistent hardware and software environment, the technology teams could more
key to meeting our customer
readily focus on determining root causes, thereby more quickly diagnosing and
SLAs and successfully
resolving application and infrastructure problems.
delivering our SaaS platform.”
• Rapid System Changes – Rolling out changes to hundreds of servers went from
- Tom Cignarella, Vice President taking hours to minutes. For example, configuration changes can be rolled out to 50
of Technical Operations & web servers within minutes, and if a mistake is made, the change can be rolled back
Support, Clickability just as quickly.
WHY PUPPET?
• Ease of Use – Compared against CFengine and other solutions, Clickability chose
Puppet because it was easy to understand, implement and maintain. Puppet proved to
be far less complicated and provided additional benefits for web server configuration.
• Greater Flexibility – Clickability felt Puppet was a robust, flexible system that
About Puppet Labs was well suited to their current web operations environment. By streamlining the
build and configuration management processes, Puppet meets Clickability’s high
Puppet Labs develops and expectations and operations needs.
commercially supports Puppet, the
leading open source platform for • Training and Support – The Puppet community has been beneficial to Clickability
enterprise systems management. by addressing any limitations and problems. Attending both Puppet training classes
With millions of nodes under and Puppet Camp helped Clickability’s system administrators better understand how
management and thousands of
to resolve common issues and increase the value they obtained from implementing
users, including Twitter, NYSE,
Zynga, Genentech, Match.com, Puppet.
eBay, NYU, and Oracle, Puppet • Supports Rapid Growth – Clickability has grown from 100 million pages served
standardizes the way IT staff deploy
and manage infrastructure in the
for their customers to over 600 million pages served for their customers in the past
enterprise and the cloud. two years. This rapid growth would have been impossible without the configuration
management automation provided by Puppet.
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