Case Study: Republic Polytechnic achieves rapid automated lab deployments and enhanced student learning with Puppet (Bolt & Puppet Enterprise)

Republic Polytechnic enhances automation, fosters student learning with Bolt and Puppet Enterprise

Republic Polytechnic’s School of Infocomm (RP SOI) needed a way to reliably provision individual student lab environments used for problem-based learning. Daily error-prone deployments across Windows and Linux machines consumed significant backend man-hours and slowed lesson delivery, so the IT support team sought automation to reduce repetitive configuration work and improve uptime for teaching labs.

The team deployed Bolt and Puppet Enterprise (a monolithic Puppet master integrated with GitLab), converting routine Bolt scripts into Puppet tasks to enforce uniform configurations and eliminate manual fixes. The change cut lab setup from 3–4 hours weekly to 10–15 minutes, reduced daily firewall reconfiguration from 2 hours to 15 minutes, freed sysadmin time, and boosted automation, scalability, productivity and collaboration between DevOps teaching and IT infrastructure.

Republic Polytechnic

Ivan Wee

Senior Lecturer, School of Infocomm