Encore Technologies Cut Time Spent on Repeat Tasks from 30 Minutes to 90 Seconds with Puppet
Encore Technologies is an IT services provider specializing in management of data center, cloud, and networking environments. The company leverages automation to provide managed services and professional services across its customers’ business-critical infrastructure and applications. Working with clients along their automation journeys, Encore turned to Puppet for automation tools to best discover and solve the issues in their clients’ workflows.
Benefits of Using Puppet
Developer tasks that took 30 minutes now take 90 seconds
Significantly reduced daily “Priority 1” client emergencies
Rapidly onboarded team using their own scripts with Puppet
Challenge: Manual Workflows and Hours of Troubleshooting
Encore was already using Puppet to continuously enforce the state of their server configurations — but they needed to do more. With a growing list of client needs, they searched for an additional tool to orchestrate and run ad hoc automation tasks like patching.
For patching Windows systems, they were using System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) and Windows Server Update Services (WSUS), while they patched Linux with Satellite and Foreman.
“All of them have something in common,” said Nick Maludy, Director of Development at Encore Technologies: “They all suck.”
Those tools didn’t afford Encore the flexibility or control they needed to maintain regular patching cadences. Maludy noted that after setting groups and rough schedules, “I have no control over when [patching] happens, how it happens, or what order those things happen in.”
Including patching, “we had certain pieces of the puzzle in the provisioning stack and in our own internal operations where we had one‐off tasks that needed attention,” Maludy said. “Bolt provided that.”
Solution: Streamlined Automation That Solved Huge Problems
Encore chose Puppet Enterprise for its robust community and the wide range of modules available in Puppet Forge. They needed a tool to redirect engineer efforts away from the manual, repetitive, and time‐consuming bug patching, a process prone to human error, toward the work that set them apart with their clients as a managed service provider.
Encore began using Bolt, the agentless automation tool within Puppet, for point‐in‐time changes, installation of critical packages, and deployment of patches to maintain and evolve system settings.
Encore simplified tasks that required multiple steps and significant time drain — successfully scaling large‐scale solutions to all relevant servers. Tasks that used to take their engineers 30 valuable minutes from their day now take only 90 seconds.
“We find Bolt and Puppet helped us implement software changes cost effectively — now we’re able to spend more time developing new automation, rather than having to keep old gear afloat.”
Nick Maludy, Director of Development, Encore Technologies
Automating Tasks to Reduce Critical Issues and Clear Queues Faster
As a result, one client company experienced a decrease of those critical, business‐wide impact “Priority 1” issues from multiple occurrences a day to one per year.
“Bolt has helped us onboard the operations of new technologies faster. Whether
we’re managing an existing system or implementing our own, we use Bolt to wrap those operations tasks into automation pieces. That’s been good for us,” Maludy added.
Encore also experienced faster employee onboarding by allowing the company to continue using its own scripts and yaml. Rather than adjust to new scripting languages, engineers continue to use the scripts they already know.
The result was a quick implementation process that uniquely combined the skills of Encore’s engineers with the rapid agentless automation of Bolt.
Building an Automated Patching Workflow for Repeatable, Customizable Patching
Patching was one of the most common repeat tasks Encore automated, both for its own systems and for its customers’ IT environments.
Using Bolt, the Encore team repeated the Encore-patching module to provide a flexible framework built with Tasks and Plans, which they can use internally and to manage their customers’ IT environments (even the ones that haven’t deployed Puppet yet).
With the Bolt-based module, Encore can patch consistently, patch as soon as a Day 0 vulnerability drops, gracefully start and stop services, perform app health checks, report on their patching infrastructure, and coordinate patching across Windows and Linux from one tool. “Before, there’d be a Windows patching team and a Linux patching team,” Maludy said. “Anyone, anywhere in the organization should be able to patch all the systems given a list of nodes.”
The module utilizes a single workflow that performs the full patching process — but crucially, it lets them expose components that can be reused so customers can implement their own patching processes. “Heaven knows patching is not one-size-fits-all,” Maludy noted. “There’s a million ways to do it.”
“We use Bolt to wrap operations tasks into automation pieces so we can quickly add those things to our toolkit,” Maludy said. “It’s meant a natural evolution over time. We’re able to start with the most painful, basic automation, and that frees us up later to get into the nitty‐gritty details of that last 10, 20 percent, and that suite of automation is expanding out into all sorts of little, cool things which allow us to provide that advanced expert advice to our clients.”
See for yourself how Puppet can speed up delivery across your organization while maximizing your resources. Try it today or request a demo with the Puppet team.