What’s Behind the Curtain of the Best Facilities Management Software?

Superior technology infrastructure is an essential element of our providing, supporting and maintaining the best facilities management software available for hundreds of multi-location companies worldwide.  But like any mission-critical software, and more and more companies are realizing that their FM software is crucial to their overall business operations, there needs to be a number of technology investments to ensure round-the-clock, 24x7x365 uptime.

One of these elements is a software toolset, from a software company called Puppet that enables us to maintain our server infrastructure with Amazon Web Services (AWS).  Puppet provides a platform for automatically delivering, operating and securing our infrastructure – so we can do the same for our clients.

Infrastructure as Code

ServiceChannel is a heavy user of the Puppet configuration management toolset. It is currently used to not only manage the company’s AWS footprint, but also the installation of software, configuration and upgrading of said systems.

Puppet provides ServiceChannel with an Infrastructure as Code environment that can be maintained via a centralized code base.  Releases are created, scheduled, and reviewed, for all infrastructure changes.  The result is a standard way of automating all of it, at scale.

Puppet provides a standard way of delivering and operating software, no matter where it runs. With the Puppet approach, you define what you want your apps and infrastructure to look like using a common easy-to-read language.  From there you can share, test and enforce the changes you want to make across your datacenter.  And at every step of the way, you have the visibility and reporting you need to make decisions and prove compliance.

Best Practices for Puppet in the Cloud

As one of ServiceChannel’s DevOps Systems Engineer (and Puppet user!), I’ll be sharing my experiences with Puppet at their upcoming 2,000+ person annual conference, PuppetConf 2016 – in San Diego, CA.

My session, Best Practices for Puppet in the Cloud will be presented this coming Thursday October 20th.  In it, I’ll go through some of the best practices the ServiceChannel DevOps team has put in place when building, deploying and managing our AWS infrastructure and associated systems.

I’ll be teaming up with AWS Tech Evangelist Randall Hunt for this talk. We’re excited to tell the story of how ServiceChannel moved into AWS, and how we have created a fully automated framework to deploy, manage, and scale our infrastructure.

In a future post, we’ll share the session’s presentation to give you a deeper understanding of the specifics of our Puppet and AWS deployment, just one of the ways we ensure we continually deliver the highest quality facilities management software available.