Drupal is an amazing tool for quickly constructing attractive, functional web sites. It lets you manage large numbers of web sites from a single installation, and (via add-on modules) provides almost any CMS or blog feature you could want.

However, like any powerful tool, Drupal takes some learning. It also needs a certain amount of discipline to manage Drupal servers without getting into a chaotic mess. The Drupal sysadmin can end up trying to navigate a spaghetti of ad-hoc symlinks and face problems upgrading, maintaining, monitoring and backing up a large Drupal installation.

Fortunately, Puppet can help you tame Drupal and use the power of configuration management to bring your Drupal sites under control. In this article I'll explain some techniques and Puppet recipes I use to manage Drupal sites and servers, including my own sites, including this one!

More and more people are turning to systems automation tools like Puppet and Chef to get the most out of their environments, and to create time to focus on delivering business benefits. Puppet is most commonly deployed in client/server mode, in which every client is issued with an SSL certificate, and conversations take place between clients and a server, over HTTP, and manifests and assets are served over the network, and applied by a locally running Puppet daemon. However, is there a better way?

Guest article by Stephen Nelson-Smith

If you're looking for Linux automation solutions, or server configuration management tools, the two technologies you're likely to come across are Puppet and Opscode Chef. They are broadly similar in architecture and solve the same kinds of problems. Puppet, from Reductive Labs, has been around longer, and has a large user base. Chef, from Opscode, has learned some of the lessons from Puppet's development, and has a high-profile client: EngineYard.

You have an important choice to make: which system should you invest in? When you build an automated infrastructure, you will likely be working with it for some years. Once your infrastructure is already built, it's expensive to change technologies.

Puppet vs. Chef is an ongoing debate, but here are 10 advantages I believe Puppet has over Chef today.

A social evening for sysadmins, developers, and the women who love them. (Or men obviously.) If you work in IT, love Unix or Macs, write code, enjoy open source products, or even if you just used to own a Spectrum when you were a kid. All are welcome to join us at the London DevOps Curry Night, Thursday the 25th of February 2010, at Lord's Restaurant in Whitfield Street (near Warren St tube):

We will meet at the restaurant around 8pm, though we'll be assembling in the nearby Smugglers Tavern from 7pm if you want to drink up an appetite!

Comment here or email me at john@bitfieldconsulting.com if you'd like to come - it would be good to have an idea of numbers.