How KPN Uses Puppet to Efficiently Manage 10,000 Servers
KPN is the largest Dutch telecommunications and IT provider and is recognized as one of the best mobile networks in the Netherlands. KPN offers fixed and mobile networks for telephone, data, and television to both residential and international customers, and provides access to their extensive network to other telecom providers.
Benefits of Using Puppet:
Gained enterprise visibility and control
across 10,000 servers, including cloud and multi-OS
Shortened app delivery pipeline
to as little as 10 minutes
Introduced scalable infrastructure
to meet customer demand
Challenge: High Customer Expectations vs. Slow Manual Processes
KPN’s customers demand a high level of quality and complete management of their entire environment, with managed services for cloud infrastructure and applications built in the cloud. As their customer base grew, the ability to manage a large and diverse infrastructure became a major hurdle for KPN — especially since they still needed to ensure consistent security configurations and demonstrate compliance.
To stay ahead of the competition, KPN needed to break apart internal silos, abandon manual processes, and improve the quality of their services for increased efficiency — which is why they turned to infrastructure as code (IaC) with Puppet Enterprise.
Results: Standardization, Visibility, Compliance, & Efficiency in a Complex Enterprise
KPN implemented Puppet Enterprise for IaC in combination with Splunk for visibility, and centrally managed it all with GitHub. They now manage 10,000 servers with 7,500 Puppet nodes on 33 Puppet servers, utilizing 251 Puppet modules.
“It was very important for us—the concept of infrastructure as code. We believed this would help for us and our customers to innovate faster. Here is where Puppet played an important role.”
- Andreas Knol, Technical Product Manager at KPN
Puppet now automates the configuration of all services, including cloud infrastructure and applications, reducing manual effort and human error. This also includes enforced security and compliance across the entire infrastructure for their customers, which simplifies change management and demonstrations to auditors.
Visibility isn’t just important for auditors and compliance, which is why KPN built a data lake for real-time insights on the status of delivered services. Puppet now reports on changes in the environment, providing continuous control.
With Puppet Enterprise, KPN can easily manage a growing number of systems (from 4,000 to a planned 8,000) across diverse environments, including standardized virtualization platforms, cloud platforms, and various operating systems (Linux, Windows, Unix).
By using Puppet to automate their own internal processes, KPN better understands the challenges their customers face and can provide support during their cloud and application transformation journeys. As KPN’s customers continue to adopt hybrid cloud strategies, Puppet ensures a consistent experience by helping their team manages both on-premises and public cloud resources.
KPN also uses Puppet Enterprise for faster application delivery. “The App Factory,” — the name KPN gave their continuous delivery (CD) pipeline — enables the deployment of application delivery pipelines in as little as 10 minutes. Puppet Enterprise manages the underlying infrastructure for seamless application deployment.
If your infrastructure is growing across hybrid environments with complex needs, Puppet Enterprise can help speed up delivery, provide continuous visibility, and reduce the manual work for your IT team. You can try Puppet Enterprise for free with a trial, or see it in action with a demo customized for your needs: