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Track Overview:Puppet 4

19 - 21 OctoberSan Diego

Enjoying the Journey From Puppet 3.x to 4.x

Puppet 4 has been out for a year and a half and you still have a Puppet 3 installation you need upgraded. We'll examine the benefits of upgrading and lay out a plan to make it happen. Many have been through the school of hard knocks, and we'll use that knowledge to make our own journey enjoyable. This session will cover both Puppet FOSS and Enterprise editions.

2

Thursday, October 20 | 11:15 am

Puppet 4

System Administrator, ATTRob Nelson

The Truth, Nothing but the Truth: Why Type Systems are Important to Configuration Management

Automating the production of computer system configurations is inherently complex, but can be made easier by creating reusable and composable components using Puppet. Correctness is important. The earlier we know if our server park will be turned into a field of smashed pumpkins or be what we intended, the faster and more reliably we can make changes. This talk introduces the concept of a type system - how do humans think - why do we call a spade a spade? Touch on the characteristics of untyped languages, duck typing, strict types, and type inference. Discuss how types can make for better CM code and how operations can learn from CS. This talk will be sprinkled with equal doses of philosophy, AI, CM, CS and examples in Puppet.

3

Thursday, October 20 | 1:30 pm

Henrik LindbergConsulting Engineer, Puppet

Puppet 4

External Data in Puppet 4

This session will look at the new Puppet 4 lookup system and compare with Hiera that came before. We will look at the following:

● Basic overview of the lookup system ● Various merge modes ● Automatic Parameter Lookup ● Data in modules ● The lookup CLI ● lookup_options data item

4

Thursday, October 20 | 2:30 pm

R.I. PienaarPrincipal Software Engineer, Puppet

Puppet 4

Puppet Best Practices: Roles & Profiles

Learn about roles and profiles with Puppet professional services engineer Gary Larizza.

5

Thursday, October 20 | 3:45 pm

Gary LarizzaProfessional Services Engineer, Puppet

Puppet 4

Closing the Loop: Direct Change Control with Puppet

Configuration management can be roughly divided into two basic problems: change what needs to change, keep the rest the same. Puppet provides a single way to talk about both of those problems and so we often treat them as a single concern. Typical change workflows make change as part of regularly scheduled remediation runs, making it difficult to know if and where a change has happened. In this session, we'll learn how to use Puppet Enterprise change orchestration to take direct control over when and how change happens. At the same time, we'll discuss how being intentional about change can make us more confident about what should stay the same.

6

Thursday, October 20 | 4:45 pm

Nick LewisSoftware Engineer, Puppet

Puppet 4

Puppet Design Patterns: Lessons From the Gang of Four

The Design Patterns book is more than just a collection of elegant solutions to common problems, it provides us with a vocabulary and framework for analyzing those problems. Discussing and applying design patterns helps shift the focus from the immediate problem to design. As the Puppet community converged on an idea of what "good" code looks like, Puppet design patterns began to emerge and design became more important. With more and more complex software being modeled in Puppet, those design patterns are more relevant than ever before. As the Puppet language takes on more general purpose and orchestration features, the need for good design patterns only grows with every release. This talk will discuss some of those design patterns and the problems that they solve.

7

Friday, October 21 | 11:15 am

David DanzilioCloud or Infrastructure Architect, Kovarus

Puppet 4

Getting to the Latest Puppet

Ready to upgrade? This session will cover the recommended methods to get you to the latest version. We'll show you the git workflow our Professional Services Engineers use to get your code ready for Puppet 4. Using the puppet preview tool, we'll show you how to generate a report, update your code based on the output, and promote that code to production.

8

Thursday, October 20 | 1:30 pm

Elizabeth Wittig Plumb

Nate McCurdyProfessional Services Engineer, Puppet

Technical Account Manager, Puppet

Puppet 4

How to Succeed in Relearning Puppet Without Really Trying

The UW - Madison Libraries recently began the process of rearchitecting its Linux infrastructure. This has included updating Puppet from an early version of Puppet 3 to Puppet 4 and taking a look at the entire toolchain that we use to support our configuration management and the general administration of our hosts. We've learned a few things and want to share out our experience. This talk will take a look at:

● How we went about identifying anti-patterns in our Puppet code and infrastructure.

● How and why we went about relearning Puppet instead of learning what had changed since we had last had time to seriously work on it.

● What processes and tools we started looking at, such as testing, secret management and code deployment.

9

Friday, October 21 | 2:30 pm

Joshua ZimmermanSystem Administrator, University of

Wisconsin

Puppet 4

Puppet 4.x: The Low WAT-tage Edition

Puppet 4 added a lot of new features, but it was also a banner release for deleting horrible stuff! And all sysadmins are connoisseurs of horrible stuff. In this talk, I'll revisit some of Puppet's buggiest language mis-features, point out which Puppet 4 improvements killed them, and show you how the revised Puppet language makes your work simpler and more predictable.

10

Friday, October 21 | 3:45 pm

Nick FagerlundTechnical Writer, Puppet

Puppet 4

Want to explore more PuppetConf sessions? View our full agenda and other tracks at puppet.com/puppetconf

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Puppet 4:Speakers

19 - 21 OctoberSan Diego

Rob NelsonSystem Administrator, ATT

Rob Nelson is an IT professional with almost 20 years of experience in the industry, mostly in Security and Operations. When he's not fixing or breaking stuff, you can find him on twitter @rnelson0 or at his blog, rnelson0.com.

Henrik LindbergConsulting Engineer, Puppet

Henrik has 30 years of experience architecting and developing software. Past positions include CTO of Cloudsmith Inc, leadership of BEA’s Java Run-Time Group (JRockit) and CTO and/or technical founder of several publicly and privately held software companies. Henrik works on the Language team at Puppet and is the author of the 4.x "future" parser, and Puppet Type System.

R.I. PienaarSystems Architect

Europe based consultant specialising in automation and systems administration. Puppet user since 0.22, author of MCollective, extlookup, Hiera, facts.d and more

Gary LarizzaProfessional Services Engineer, Puppet

Gary has been a Professional Services Engineer with Puppet since 2011 (when our logo was a flask and Luke's shoes were blue). When he's not trying to human-parse JSON, his interests include travel, house music that doesn't sound like Transformer intercourse, and not having to explain the anchor pattern.

Nick LewisSoftware Engineer, Puppet

Nick Lewis has been an engineer at Puppet for six years, working on myriad projects in that time. He was one of the authors of PuppetDB and most recently has worked on Puppet application orchestration. Nick also helps run Puppet's HipChat bot Kerminator.

David DanzilioCloud or Infrastructure Architect, Kovarus

David is an architect at Kovarus and lives in Boston, MA. He's been using Puppet since 2009, well before it was the cool thing to do. He has a background in operations for government, higher education, research, healthcare, and SaaS organizations. David has consulted on several Puppet implementations of varying size and complexity and has worked with numerous teams on integrating Puppet into their workflow. David is passionate about open source and contributes to a number of projects. David is one of the maintainers of the Vox Pupuli project (voxpupuli.org), an effort to bring together Puppet developers and users to collectively maintain popular modules and plugins. He holds an MBA in management information systems as well as a BA in political science.

Nate McCurdyNate McCurdy, Puppet

Nate McCurdy is a professional services engineer at Puppet. A consultant since grade school, Nate's been helping sysadmins and non-sysadmins alike (hi mom!) figure out those pesky computering bleep-blop machines. With experience maintaining everything from simple desktops and servers to regional NOC's to massive Puppet installations, Nate brings a wide variety of skill sets to help answer the question of: "How do I do less work and get more done?" When Nate's not automating your issues away, showing off his zsh prompt, or running cat6 through his house again, you'll find him relaxing to a nice sour lambic somewhere in Portland... actually, wait no, no, yeah not relaxing, it's catching a flight again.... that's the one.

Elizabeth Wittig PlumbTechnical Account Manager, Puppet

Elizabeth Plumb started working at Puppet in January 2014. She was a technical solutions engineer, helping new users understand what Puppet Enterprise is and how to use it, before moving into her current position as a technical account manager. Her focus is working with larger customers, understanding how they use Puppet Enterprise, helping them be successful with the tool, and advocating for her customers internally at Puppet.

Joshua ZimmermanSystem Administrator, University of Wisconsin

Joshua has worked for the University of Wisconsin - Madison Libraries for the past decade, playing a variety of roles ranging from helpdesk support, web developer, and Windows systems administration. For the past four years, Joshua has been part of a team of administrators architecting and maintaining an ever-growing Linux server environment for applications both developed in house and procured from vendors. In his spare time, Joshua co-organizes the Madison DevOps meetup.

Nick FagerlundTechnical Writer, Puppet

Nick Fagerlund has been writing for docs.puppet.com for about five years, and likes doing experiments on software. A few years ago he tried to make the worst repository of Puppet code anyone had ever seen, then gave a talk about it at PuppetConf.

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