Case Study: University of Oregon achieves centralized, managed campus infrastructure with Puppet

University of Oregon provisions VMs in 8 minutes with Puppet

The University of Oregon, a decentralized IT campus, faced the challenge of providing a consistent, centralized automation platform to over a dozen disparate departments without hindering their autonomy or rapid innovation. Their existing open-source Puppet setup and manual approval processes were unable to scale effectively, leading to a high volume of support requests and potential stability issues across the environment. They turned to Puppet to find a solution.

By implementing Puppet Enterprise and Continuous Delivery for Puppet Enterprise, the university created a multi-tenant solution. This allowed them to partition each department's infrastructure code into separate, permissioned repositories with role-based access control. The solution provided centralized management and reporting while granting delegated admins autonomy. The results included a dramatically improved provisioning process, reducing the time to provision virtual machines from days to just eight minutes, and a significant reduction in compilation errors through isolated testing.

University of Oregon

Lucas Crownover

Lead Systems Administrator and Puppet architect for Information Services at University of Oregon