Puppet on a network equipment

The automation of network equipments' configuration is a common need. When we provision a new system, besides its own settings, we often need to manage switching ports to assign it to the correct VLAN, firewalls to open the relevant ports, and load balancers to add the server to a balanced pool.

It is obvious that the possibility of automating the configuration of the whole infrastructure, network included, is a powerful and welcomed point.

There are two main challenges in front of Puppet when it has to deal with network devices. They are as follows:

• Technical: This is simply due to the impossibility of having the puppet executable running on the device to be managed

• Cultural: This is because at many places, network administrators don't know or use Puppet

For the technical challenge, there is good news. Alternative approaches have been taken to manage Puppet network equipments of various natures and from different vendors:

• Proxy mode: In our manifests, we declare...