Why focus on Container management with puppet

Question

There certainly are other ways to manage Docker instances, containers and clusters, including some native to Docker itself. Why pick up puppet?

Answer 1

As with any other IT endeavor, your chosen toolchain both provides and limits your capabilities.

For a home system, your choice of toolchain is largely a matter of taste, but in the data center, it's often better to leverage existing tools and in-house expertise whenever possible.

Puppet is a good choice because it is a strong enterprise-class solution that has been widely deployed for more than a decade. However, you could do much the same thing with Chef or Ansible if you choose.

Puppet also was selected over other container orchestration tools because many large organizations already make use of at least one configuration management tool.

In many cases, it's advantageous to include container management within the existing toolchain rather than climbing the learning curve of a more specialized tool, such as Kubernetes.

If you already use Puppet, Chef or Ansible in your data center, getting started with container management by extending your current toolset is probably smart money.

However, if you find yourself bumping up against the limitations of your configuration management tool, you may want to evaluate other enterprise-class solutions, such as Apache Mesos, Kubernetes or DC/OS.