Sessions at PuppetConf about Puppet on Friday 23rd September

At Google, different teams deploy multiple operating systems via Puppet. This talk will cover the layout of our Puppet manifests and the practices we use when checking in and deploying code, including:

• Using environments to provide testing tracks to our OS teams.
• Where code reuse via common module paths has worked and where it has not.
• Code validation using pre-commit hooks.
• Deploying IT services using Puppet.
• Health checking Puppet servers

Apache Whirr is an incubator project focused on simplifying management of distributed services such as Hadoop, ElasticSearch, and Cassandra. Using Whirr, you can (in a single line) startup a cluster from scratch in your cloud provider of choice, or even from a list of machines in a text file. This discussion will show how you can create support for a new service without writing code. We'll review the an interaction module based on JSON formatted node lists and Puppet modules, in context of a working Cassandra configuration. You'll understand pros and cons of this approach, and see where it makes sense to use master vs masterless Puppet mechanisms.

An in depth look at the Puppet Faces API and how to leverage it to streamline your configuration management workflow. During this talk a data driven Puppet Face will be created from the ground up. The goal is to automate a common workflow scenario which involves updating Puppet Dashboard external node configuration (ENC) data in bulk. This talk will cover the following topics:

• Core components: Options, Arguments, and Actions
• Creating new Puppet subcommands
• Integrating Puppet with other tools
• Gotchas

The cloud reinforces some old concepts of building highly scalable architectures and introduces some new concepts that entirely change the way applications are built, developed and deployed. In order to leverage the full potential of the cloud and enjoy all the benefits it has to offer, it is important to understand these concepts and make them intrinsic part of your cloud-based application architecture.

This session will discuss these concepts and benefits of automating your cloud-powered software development lifecycle with examples and highlight some basic patterns, tactics and practices that you as developer and architect can easily incorporate and implement in your cloud-based software development lifecycle. These concepts are also described in the whitepaper Architecting for the Cloud: Best Practices. More specifically, it will focus on how you can leverage the AWS CloudFormation that gives the ability to automate the deployment of complex environments using only a simple JSON configuration file - and the powerful Puppet Framework together.

A tour of Puppet providers and how they can be used to manage the unique parts of your infrastructure. Learn the nitty-gritty details of provider development, such as:

• Structure of provider code,
• How to test types and providers, and
• Inheritance and scoping of providers and their subclasses

Building a provider which works as expected can be a daunting task, so each topic will be addressed while building a custom provider.

Small to medium business can pay a heavy overhead in data center hardware and staffing costs, particularly in growth phases. The advent of utility computing meshes well with automation tools to significantly reduce this overhead and provide greater agility to businesses that would otherwise have laborious spin up processes for projects and customers.

This session will cover several scenarios where Janrain has solved operational automation and management tasks with puppet and related tools. Topics will include: User management and access control, Puppet manifest development and release process, and code release automation.

Puppet and MCollective are critical to building and scaling infrastructure as well as applications that are reliable and resilient. Once deployed and running, it is also critical to continuously ensure proper performance and service health. As such Puppet, MCollective, and a monitoring tool such as Nagios or Zenoss can perfectly supplement each other. This talk will focus on showing the synergies/integration, as well as point out the benefits of using both, Puppet and Zenoss. The speaker will present real world use cases and present a newly developed integration plug-in between the two.