Cloud for the enterprise

Portions of this post were originally posted on the Puppet blog, and are republished here with Puppet’s permission.

Enterprise companies turn to the cloud for lots of reasons: to quickly and economically provide development and testing environments; to burst at times of peak customer demand; and to generally be able to make changes faster and more flexibly.

Whatever you think you may need from the cloud — and whatever concerns and reservations you may have — others have been there.

Puppet’s new ebook, Cloud and the Enterprise, outlines the concerns that IT managers have about the cloud, such as security and avoiding vendor lock-in. Puppet customers tell you about how they’ve addressed these concerns, and the part that Puppet plays.

Magesh Ruthrapathy, VP of IT at 1-800-Flowers.com, explains:

One of our goals is to rapidly build the whole application stack in the cloud — internal or external, or hybrid — and to tear it down and build it back again as and when we need it. How can we do all that, including required customization, without an automation tool like Puppet.

Download Cloud and the Enterprise to hear real-life stories about managing cloud infrastructure, and to get answers to the following questions:

• How do we design a cloud infrastructure that’s both robust and flexible?
• How do we manage the cloud with the same policies we enforce for our physical infrastructure? 
• How do we control security in the cloud?
• How do we create the right self-service options for development and testing?
• How do we prevent waste and prevent costs from spiraling skyward?

Shifts in business practices can often be daunting, but moving to the cloud — and through it — doesn’t have to be. Get the ebook and learn to efficiently adopt the cloud for building new applications and scaling existing workloads.