Constant Contact adopted Puppet and DevOps practices to increase agility and efficiency. Puppet enabled faster deployment, consistency across environments, and collaboration between development and operations. This increased productivity allowing a smaller team to manage more infrastructure. Puppet provided an accessible, secure configuration management system and training to help Constant Contact transition to a more flexible, model-driven approach.

1. puppet
labs Case Study
“Puppet has been a huge
win for us. It has been a
strategic DevOps initiative
that has improved both
the quality and time to
market for our products.”
– Dave Connors, VP of Operations
CONSTANT CONTACT
INCREASES AGILITY WITH
PUPPET & DEVOPS PRACTICES
Constant Contact’s email marketing, social media
marketing, event marketing, and online survey tools
INDUSTRY: help small organizations grow their businesses by
Web Software building stronger customer relationships. More than
400,000 small businesses, nonprofit organizations,
CHALLENGE: and member associations worldwide rely on Constant
Increase Agility and Efficiency Contact’s easy-to-use, affordable online tools to create
and deliver personalized, professional communications
SOLUTION: that engage casual customers, members, prospects, and
Puppet and On-site Training
passionate customers wherever they congregate online
RESULTS: — from their email inboxes to their social networks.
Faster Adoption of DevOps
All Constant Contact products come with unmatched
Practices, Increased
education, training and personal coaching services, and
Productivity and Agility
award-winning technical support. Constant Contact is in
the top twenty email senders worldwide.
STARTING ENVIRONMENT KEY OBJECTIVES
• The operations team is responsible for the infrastructure and • Adopt DevOps Practices – Unified Deployment
delivery of all Constant Contact services, including email, from Development through QA to Production allows
surveys, event management and social media marketing. for development and operations to collaborate on
• Constant Contact has hundreds of servers across multiple data application requirements and deployment at the
centers, so managing multiple integrated SaaS applications is inception of a new feature or application.
a unique challenge. Constant Contact’s environment has also • Efficiency – Similar to other SaaS enterprises,
evolved over the last 10 years to include systems running on Constant Contact requires a very low cost per
multiple technologies and subsystems, as well as recent company transaction. This demands that individuals, systems
acquisitions. and the organization operate at maximum efficiency
• Constant Contact’s development teams transitioned to agile to provide the company’s services. Puppet delivers
practices a few years ago, starting with traditional scrum and on this need.
more recently using Kanban. The development scrum teams • Flexibility – Puppet enabled a natural transition
eventually became constrained by the backlog of work in the from the legacy deployment infrastructure and offers
DevOps realm. Conversely, the operations teams were impeded the ability to quickly deploy and reprioritize system
by the fixed time intervals of the application release cycle. resources for capacity and performance reasons.

2. puppet
labs Case Study
“Getting started with BENEFITS OBTAINED
Puppet was easy, but it
• Speed of Deployment – Constant Contact has committed to scaling horizontally
was the training and the
using commodity hardware. Application configurations have been standardized. These
emphasis on separating two initiatives have resulted in a significant reduction in application deployment from
the configuration test environments through production.
from the code that • Consistency – According to Dave Connors, VP of Operations at Constant Contact,
helped us dramatically “Puppet ensures that we have a known configuration baseline for our application
environment.” Troubleshooting issues on individual servers now starts with
manage our systems confidence in the baseline configuration and is that much faster.
in a different way.”
• Collaboration – Puppet has facilitated the teams’ ability to adopt DevOps practices.
– Mark Schena, Manager The Operations team can give developers the ability to make changes on their own
of Systems systems, and Operations can work more closely with the application teams. Mark
Schena, Manager of Systems at Constant Contact, is pleased with the impact of the
change. “Separation of configuration from code was a huge win for us, allowing the
company to keep moving forward to provide features and work on different parts of
the solution at the same time.”
• Productivity – Constant Contact realized that its traditional practice of using scripts,
executed using “SSH and a for loop” were no longer adequate. Utilizing Puppet has
allowed a team of two sys admins to manage all of the email infrastructure. According
to Connors, “It would take several more sys admins to do this work without Puppet.”
• Agility – Connors comments, “We expected a benefit from the new approach to
configuration management. We have been very surprised at how much of an impact it
has had on our team. Puppet has given Operations the agility we need to accomplish
our tasks.
About Puppet Labs
WHY PUPPET?
• Accessible – Open source software with an active community, best of breed software,
Puppet Labs develops and
commercially supports Puppet, the and wide spread adoption has made Puppet an obvious choice.
leading open source platform for • Security – Puppet offers certificate-based security. The other solutions they evaluated
enterprise systems management.
were not ready for this step. The security team now uses Puppet to review changes to
With millions of nodes under
management and thousands of our systems. Additionally, Puppet provides certitude that the server has data, systems
users, including Twitter, NYSE, and configuration integrity.
Zynga, Genentech, Match.com,
eBay, NYU, and Oracle, Puppet
• Versioning – Constant Contact can apply version control practices to any part
standardizes the way IT staff deploy of its infrastructure as a corollary to using Puppet. This allows for Life Cycle
and manage infrastructure in the Management principles to be adopted within Operations. Schena adds, “Puppet runs
enterprise and the cloud. a configuration exactly how it should every time, and with version control, we know
what the configuration was in the past as well.”
www.puppetlabs.com • Training & Support – The training from Puppet Labs accelerated Constant Contact’s
ability to take advantage of the new model-driven approach to configuration
877-575-9775 management.
411 NW Park Avenue, 5th floor
Portland OR 97209
© 2011 Puppet Labs All trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.