Puppet Blog - Page 12

In virtual data centers both on-premises and in the cloud, lifecycle management is particularly challenging for administrators due to the dynamic nature and volume of nodes that need to be deployed and managed. Puppet Enterprise can ease a lot of these challenges by allowing  IT teams to automate the deployment and management of their VMware virtual infrastructure.

At my last job, and before I knew much about Puppet, I had a configuration challenge I solved the way a lot of us have: I wrote a script. I got tired of passing lots of configuration parameters to the script, so I created a YAML file. Over time, that YAML file became a source of truth upon which all my scripts depended.

If you’re using Puppet, you already understand why the scripts had to go. If you’ve heard about Hiera, you might already know that I got to keep the YAML file.

We’re excited to announce the availability of Puppet Enterprise 2.8, which introduces the ability to manage nodes running IBM’s AIX operating system. We consistently heard from our customers that IBM AIX was a critical part of many IT infrastructures, particularly in finance, retail and manufacturing sectors. When conducting customer research, we found that users of […]

Did you know that you can use workflow and testing to ensure you get the configurations you asked for in a secure manner? In this post, we discuss how.

Puppet compiles a catalog using Puppet DSL code and data that’s usually at rest on the local filesystem of the puppet master. An agent requests a catalog from a master, and subsequently enforces the catalog locally. It’s common for multiple teams to collaborate on the configuration code and data, with the different teams being responsible for different modules. Often times, this means that the Puppet module path is actually made up of two or more module paths, where each modulepath entry is a different version control system repository managed by a different team.

  modulepath = /data/puppet/core/modules:/data/puppet/webapps/modules

I will have a manifest (maybe an ENC too, but let’s just talk about manifests here):

  manifest = /data/puppet/manifests/site.pp

I am more likely to have my core security modules in the first part of my module path. Potentially I *could* have a class security {..} in both halves of my module path; however, the module found first by the autoloader will take precedence, and the module in the web apps part of the path won’t be evaluated. It’s important to get the configurations that you want in first, especially because there’s no hard and fast rule that will restrict resource definitions for security configurations to that security module. Any resource declaration might be in any module, subject to uniqueness constraints, and so forth.

Thus, my security class manages a resource:

   user { 'root': 
    password => 'myspecialpasswordhash',
  } 

If another class attempts to manage the same resource, Puppet will return a catalog compilation error, and no configurations will be managed. This is good. My root user won’t get hosed by a rogue configuration. However, there’s a twist to this story. What if my manifest (site.pp) declares another class ‘configurethewebserver‘? That class is defined in the the second half of my module path (which is where the modules that deploy my applications live, as opposed to the core standard operating environment), and gets declared, quite legitimately, in a node definition in the site manifest.

Less than a year ago, EMC and Puppet Labs announced the availability of Razor, our next-generation discovery and provisioning solution for bare metal and virtual machines. Since the launch, thousands of people have tested Razor, and we’ve made significant improvements and bug fixes to the solution. Today, I’m pleased to announce release 0.8.0 of Project […]

A few days ago, I left you with Part 1: Top Questions on Puppet and Windows. As I mentioned in that blog post, I received a ton of questions during a Puppet Enterprise and Windows webinar that I recently hosted — so many that I couldn’t get to all of them. In part 1, I answered […]

A few weeks ago, the Puppet Labs Security team received emails from two community members informing us the our website was vulnerable. Two of the attacks mentioned were CRIME and BEAST attacks. Up until now, most of the mails that have been addressed to this team have been to report security issues with one of […]

Last week, I hosted a webinar on Puppet and Puppet Enterprise on Windows. During the half-hour-long demo, I covered a number of items, including how to use Puppet Enterprise to manage Windows machines, and how to manage fundamental resources on Windows (in contrast with the same resources on Linux). I also dove deeper into Windows-specific resources, such […]

Good testing of Puppet code involves different approaches and techniques that can be complex and time consuming. You can test your manifests’ syntax with puppet parser validate, verify their code style with puppet-lint, test modules logic and behaviour at catalog level with rspec-puppet, and check the actual effect of a Puppet run on dispensable virtual […]

Puppet and Puppet Enterprise come with a basic file server, allowing agents to fetch files from the master. This capability is suitable for small files, but when used with large binaries it can cause performance issues on the master.

S3file provides a simple Puppet type to fetch and update files stored in an Amazon S3 bucket or in your private OpenStack Swift storage environment. This allows you to store large files outside of Puppet, while still keeping the resource model provided by the existing Puppet file types.

S3file is written to be compatible with the old Puppet 2.7 as well as the latest Puppet 3.0, making it easy to integrate with any Puppet deployment.

Module of the Week: puppetlabs/puppetdb – PuppetDB Management – Install and manage the PuppetDB server and database, and configure the Puppet master to use PuppetDB

Puppet Enterprise can be used to do anything from automating repetitive tasks to managing large, complex infrastructure, but it can also solve real problems in small doses. We’ve compiled a list of awesome things that you can do—or do better, faster, stronger—with 10 nodes or less of Puppet Enterprise.