A presentation from CERN during the PuppetConf. Some very interesting items in there:

  • I was somewhat surprised at how much diversity they have. I thought they ran what effectively is a grid compute network with identical nodes.
  • They operate at huge scale. It requires a completely different way of thinking about power and data and resource management.
  • “Evaluate solutions, identify functional gaps and challenge them” – a very succinct way to describe a core IT function.
  • I like the analogy of thinking of your machines as pets and cattle. You care for your pets, but you shoot your cattle if something is wrong. Your infrastructure should be made out of “cattle”.
  • Their tool chain (puppet/foreman/openstack/mcollective/bamboo/git) is accessible to anyone and they understand the value of active community.

The overview is here. If you want to skip the CERN background, the technical part of the talk starts at ~11:00 minutes. This follow up talk gets into more technical detail of their puppet use.