Puppet at Constant Contact

Adoption, the process

Constant Contact

Market leader for Small Businesses• Email, Event, Survey & Social Campaigns• ~500k paying customers• Many customers pay as little as $15 a month

Technology• 87 applications, mix of old/new codebase• Two datacenters• ~2 million database transactions per minute

Why Puppet?

• Scaling

• Decentralization• Diverse app servers• Distributed systems• Agile Kanban dev teams• Service architecture

• Social apps need to iterate faster

How to manage all these servers?

Control of Change

Daemon mode, at last

Cultural Change, part one

Ok,

let’s start with

Incremental Config

&

Push

Time to market better, but…

Special thanks to:

Our DevOps, “we can do this with Puppet” guy, Mark Schena

& our puppetmaster, Aleks Margan

Cultural Change, part two

It works, right?

Yes, errr. Well… kinda.

12

The dream of CI

Fix The Flow

I Я COW!

Configuration as code?

Configuration as code!

19

Repository layout

application repository• code• puppet module• integration tests• database schema

Source Control

puppet repository• common puppet modules• system puppet modules

Two types of puppet modules

• Common modules provide non-application-specific classes and resources.

• Application modules leverage common modules to configure an environment for a given application.

+ =

application module common module

running application

Okay, I lied, there’s three types of puppet modules

Module development workflow

Deployment

complete set of puppet modules

puppetmaster

environmentenvironmentenvironmentenvironment

QA-1 QA-2 PROD

Thanks!“Dave Connors” <dconnors@constantcontact.com>VP, Operations

“Hawk Newton” <hnewton@constantcontact.com> Software Architect