Last week I was in Chicago giving a talk at PostgresOpen on managing PostgreSQL with puppet. The talk was well attended and appears to have been well received.
Puppet is configuration management software that allows you to describe how your servers should look using a declarative syntax. You describe what packages you want to install (obviously postgres) and how your configuration files should look. Puppet also allows you to run commands to create databases or database objects such as users.
In my talk I discuss why it is important to use a repeatable procedure for building production database servers and how this is a tool in bridging the divide between developers and operations staff.
I talk about how deploying servers with automation allows your servers to be similar. Similar might not mean identical but the differences between your database servers is controlled and managed. This also applies to your development and QA servers. If you deploy your staging, QA, and development servers using the same puppet manifest as your production servers but with possibly different configuration options then you will be more confident in your testing.
You can view my slides. They recorded the talk and I will update this post with a link to the talk when it is posted.
