Continuous Delivery for Puppet Enterprise 2.3: smarter, better, faster, stronger

by Carl Caum|7 February 2019

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A few days ago we released Continuous Delivery for Puppet Enterprise 2.3. I’m so incredibly proud of our team and the work delivered with this release. It’s mind blowing to see these enhancements in place and even more exciting to know that we addressed so much of what our users wanted in such a short amount of time.

Aside from the number of enhancements and a super great new feature, spoiler alert, “Message Center”, we’ve dramatically reduced the amount of time it takes to get up and running with Continuous Delivery for Puppet Enterprise. In fact, it now takes just three steps and a few seconds to get started. But we didn’t stop there. Continuous Delivery for Puppet Enterprise 2.3 now includes the following support and enhancements:

New Puppet module based installer

You can now automate and simplify the installation and ongoing management of Continuous Delivery for PE and the job hardware. Learn more about the new module here: https://forge.puppet.com/puppetlabs/cd4pe

Support for LDAP

Many of you have been asking for better support for LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol). Continuous Delivery for PE now supports multiple LDAP servers and AD domains, group mapping and toggleable recursive group lookups, and far more attribute mapping.

Eventual consistency deployment policy

Some of you rely on eventual consistency when deploying Puppet changes. Particularly for large customers, running the orchestrator across thousands or tens of thousand of hosts to push out a change is unrealistic. You can now perform a pipeline deployment that deploys the new Puppet code to Puppet Enterprise but does not issue an orchestrator job, instead relying on eventual consistency for the change to be deployed to agents.

Improved Docker support

Speed improvements for Docker jobs

Docker-based jobs are now speedier and considerably more reliable. In particular, Docker-based jobs now:

Run significantly faster (seconds as opposed to minutes)
Take up much less disk space per job
Support local and private Docker registries

Support for Docker run parameter

Docker jobs are now be able to pass parameters to the Docker runtime. This is useful, for example, when a user needs to add host IPs to the /etc/hosts file in the container.

Deployment status reporting

In previous version, when Continuous Delivery for PE performed a deployment, it wasn’t always easy to learn about the results of that deployment. What changed? Where? Continuous Delivery for PE now directly links to the PE orchestration jobs created as part of the deployment so you can quickly see what was changed.

Introducing the Message Center

Continuous Delivery for PE now indicates and guides you through any actions you need for a particular release. For example, in this release, if you are using Docker-based jobs, you will need to upgrade your Continuous Delivery for PE job hardware agents.

Local disk storage

One of the biggest challenges many of you had when installing Continuous Delivery for PE was setting up Artifactory or S3 for job storage. Now you can use local disk storage with a Docker volume to remove the need for any external object storage, significantly reducing the time it takes to get Continuous Delivery for PE up and running.

Give these new features a spin

It’s great to see these new features come to life and how we’re addressing customer feedback. Continuous Delivery for Puppet Enterprise 2.3 is packed full of great features and enhancements that every Puppet Enterprise customer should get their hands on.

Carl Caum is a product manager at Puppet.