Puppet Blog - Page 12 – Tips & How To

Management of network devices is one of the exciting new features in Puppet Enterprise 2.0 and Puppet 2.7. In the initial release, support is limited to Cisco devices, but because Puppet is extensible via modules, we are able to build upon the existing framework and add support for F5 BIG-IP. Like most network appliances, installation […]

In a previous blog post, we introduced use cases for separating configuration data from Puppet code. This post (part one of a two part series) will go in-depth with installing, configuring, and using Hiera, but let’s first look at WHY we would need Hiera. Introduction to the SSH module One of the benefits of Hiera […]

You’ve bought Pro Puppet, downloaded a couple of modules from the Puppet Forge (and have written some of your own too), and you’re on your way to implementing your Puppet environment when it hits you: something feels bulky with the way you’ve designed your Puppet code. Your modules may not be portable between environments (development, […]

One of the issues that crops up when working with Puppet is ensuring that your manifests do what you expect. Errors are bound to happen. A missed brace can make a manifest not compile, or forgetting to include a module or set a variable may mean that running Puppet on the host fails to enforce […]

Getting Started With Puppet Weekly Webinar: Ask Your Puppet Enterprise Questions Get a Live Management demo, and ask your burning PE questions. Puppet Enterprise 2.0 How To: Cloud Provisioning Start provisioning in the public and private cloud today. VIDEO: AWS CloudFormation and Puppet Enterprise 2.0 How to build out Puppet Enterprise stacks with CloudFormation. Forge […]

Written in conjunction with Tino Vazquez from the OpenNebula Project, and cross-posted on the OpenNebula blog. Puppet is used for managing the infrastructure for many IaaS software packages, including Eucalyptus, OpenStack, and OpenNebula. OpenNebula is an IaaS manager which can not only manage a large amount of different virtualization and public cloud platforms, it can […]

The Puppet CloudFormation Face integrates Puppet Enterprise (PE) with CloudFormation so that users can reliably create entire Puppet Enterprise “stacks” in Amazon’s EC2 from their workstation. A “stack” refers to a collection of launched Amazon Web Services (AWS) “resources” that can be specified as a “template” in CloudFormation’s declarative json modeling language. Templates support a […]

With the release of Puppet Enterprise 2.0, Puppet Labs has added cloud provisioning capabilities with support for some of the most popular public and private cloud offerings including Amazon EC2 and VMware. PE 2.0 allows you to quickly provision virtual machines and start managing them with Puppet right away. Getting Started The following set of […]

This post is the second in a series on Live Management, new in Puppet Enterprise 2.0, a capability that lets you visually discover, clone, and manage resources across your entire deployment, all through the graphical interface (GUI). In the first post in this series we covered how to make quick changes across your infrastructure by […]

Cloud computing has brought many benefits to enterprises and startups alike. Not only has it dramatically lowered the cost and time of getting from a prototype to a live product, it has lowered the time required to scale to increased demand. However, the benefits of cloud computing come with difficulties. One of these challenges is […]

With Puppet we build infrastructures, piece by piece, manifest after manifest. We control how nodes are configured, what services they provide, how they are checked. We manage where web applications stay and sometimes how they are built, tested, and deployed. Puppet has a lot of knowledge about our systems. Every catalog we receive is an […]

So in the last few weeks I’ve switched my Puppet development workflow to use Geppetto as an IDE for developing Puppet content.

Looking for more device management? Read about it here: Managing F5 BIG-IP Network Devices with Puppet Puppet 2.7.0 was recently released. This version, like every new Puppet release, brings numerous new features (and not counting bug fixes), including one I’m very proud of: Network Device Management. This all started during the Puppet Camp Europe 2010 […]

Parameterized classes are a huge step forward in the Puppet language. They allow configurations to be composed as a collection of well-defined interfaces, expose those interfaces to introspection, and eliminate any order dependencies commonly encountered with dynamic scoping and include. Below, I will share my experiences and thoughts about how to model configurations with parameterized […]

This follows on from my previous post on Faces and starts to break down the components that make up the Faces system. The fundamental components here are: Facades – the ways you can interact with your Faces and Actions. Faces – these represent a coherent subsystem, or modelled object or entity. Actions – these represent […]

The goal of this design pattern is to keep configurable data in one place and make it friendly to an ENC. This addresses the problem of module reusability. If you have are keeping data in your module, then someone else cannot just reuse your module without making changes to the code. This pattern solves that […]

Mac Inventory/Warranty Lookups with MCollective Maintaining an accurate inventory of all of your machines is an oft-neglected evil for IT staff. Knowing when a machine was purchased and, more importantly, if it’s still under warranty is often overlooked until something malfunctions. Most vendors provide a way to access the machine’s serial number programmatically, and many […]

Upgrading Puppet can be a long and involved process, particularly when skipping major versions. New language features are a included in each Puppet major version release. These changes, however, mean that upgrading Puppet is not a simple matter of installing a new package. The Puppet master should be upgraded to the new version first, then […]