Planet Puppet

Your source of Puppet technical information

Thursday, 05. December 2024

Contributions of ‘Ghost Engineers’

2 days ago | Source: Overlook InfraTech

Last week was Thanksgiving for the USA and while I don’t personally celebrate the holiday or the violent colonization it represents, it does encourage me to reflect back on some of the things I’m most thankful for. Once again, you won’t be surprised to hear that it’s people. Coworkers, friends, community members, industry professionals that I learn from and am inspired by every day. People that I’m

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Saturday, 23. November 2024

Future proofing open source

14 days ago | Source: Overlook InfraTech

We had a slight disagreement with our attorney while drafting our articles of incorporation and related documents. He’d used some very aggressive language around the ownership of intellectual property and whatnot. It was pretty standard lingo but it just rubbed us both the wrong way and we asked him to tone it down significantly. This prompted a long discussion about our open source business model.

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Wednesday, 13. November 2024

Alpha community package availability

24 days ago | Source: Overlook InfraTech

Well, I’ve got some great news for you. Thanks to hard work by a few volunteers, we have alpha community-built packages up and the starts of a download mirror list, which you can find on the new “downloads” page. But let’s talk a bit before you go racing off to install and make sure you know what you’re dipping into.

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Friday, 08. November 2024

It was only a matter of time

29 days ago | Source: Overlook InfraTech

Well, it looks like they did it. Perforce has all but closed the Puppet source. To be fair, they didn’t actually change the license itself, but they’ve gone as far as they could and still remain compliant. They’re forking projects internally where all their development will happen and pinkie-swear promise that ….. eventually ….. that work will make it to the public repositories.

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Thursday, 31. October 2024

A Flock of Flutter devs

1 months ago | Source: Overlook InfraTech

Flutter is a neat little UI toolkit allowing you to build applications targeting most major platforms. It started out mobile only, iOS and Android. Today it supports web and desktop too. I poked at it back in the day when I was considering some fun mobile app dev side projects. It made a pretty big splash initially, with a lot of community interest. Was it to be the fabled universal toolkit?

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Monday, 21. October 2024

Community stewardship matters

2 months ago | Source: Overlook InfraTech

Some years ago I got caught up in a very annoying conflict with James over r/puppet. I don’t remember if he’d created the space or not, but he’d been the sole moderator for years. He’d been doing an excellent job, but recently he’d been drifting away from the Puppet community and spending more of his time on his mgmt project. (Which is totally cool and you should check it out sometime.)

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Wednesday, 16. October 2024

Everything is on fire….

2 months ago | Source: Overlook InfraTech

I’ve been pretty quiet since leaving Puppet in July. And circumstances this week aren’t exactly how I wanted to pop my head up again and tell you what I was up to. I’ve done some private consulting with a few of y’all over the years, and had planned to expand on that. Check out the Services page for more information if you’re interested. But that’s not what I want to talk about today.

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Sunday, 08. September 2024

Game Day Every Day: How AWS Prepares for the Unexpected

3 months ago | Source: Laurent Domb Blog

I had the pleasure to speak to John Gaffney from PYMNTS.com about resiliences on AWS, and how we help our customers to build a resilience posture that maps business requirements. Full interview here: www.pymnts.com/news/security-and-risk/2024/chaos-engineering-aws-chief-technologist-on-preparing-for-the-unexpected/

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Wednesday, 31. July 2024

Lab Infra Rebuild Part 6

4 months ago | Source: R.I.Pienaar - www.devco.net

This is the final in a series of posts about rebuilding my lab infrastructure, see the initial post here.

Today we’ll wrap things up with a look at some SaaS tools I use and a general look through some small utilities and things I use to bring it all together.

I’ve been enjoying my summer for the last 3 months hence the hiatus of posts.

Email

Long ago I used to r

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Wednesday, 08. May 2024

Puppet best practice

7 months ago | Source: betadots

At betadots, during our Puppet code reviews, we often receive requests for a comprehensive summary of best practices and guidelines.
In response, we've compiled this article to delve deep into Puppet's best practices and implementations.

Table of content

  • Control Repo
    • Test your control-repo!
  • Hiera
  • Node Classification
  • [ Read More ]

Thursday, 25. April 2024

Lab Infra Rebuild Part 5

8 months ago | Source: R.I.Pienaar - www.devco.net

This is an ongoing post about rebuilding my lab infrastructure, see the initial post here.

Today let’s look at VMs and Baremetals and Operating Systems.

Virtual Machines

As I mentioned I’ve been a Linode customer since essentially their day one and have had many 100s of machines there for personal and client needs.

I soured off them quite significantly after they

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Tuesday, 16. April 2024

Unveiling the Simplicity of Cluster Mesh for Kubernetes Deployments

8 months ago | Source: Camptocamp Blog

Unveiling the Simplicity of Cluster Mesh for Kubernetes Deployments

During Kubecon EU 2024, among a crowd of tech enthusiasts and Kubernetes aficionados, Liz Rice the Queen bee, demo’ed multi-cluster networking. This is Cluster Mesh 101 with Cilium.

Here are a few paragraphs summarizing the experience.

Overview

Cluster Mesh extends the networking plane acro

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Thursday, 11. April 2024

Lab Infra Rebuild Part 4

8 months ago | Source: R.I.Pienaar - www.devco.net

This is an ongoing post about rebuilding my lab infrastructure, see the initial post here.

Today I’ll talk about my physical office and office hardware.

Office Space

When my son started going to school I did not look forward to all the driving so figured a office near his school would be good, I’d spend the days there and come home after pick up. I rented a nice place i

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Wednesday, 10. April 2024

Beyond the Buzz: Embracing the Magic of eBPF in Kubernetes

8 months ago | Source: Camptocamp Blog

Beyond the Buzz: Embracing the Magic of eBPF in Kubernetes

In a time where the buzz around Artificial Intelligence (AI) seems to overshadow everything else, this year's KubeCon Europe offered a refreshing perspective. While AI continues to be a hot topic, some in the Kubernetes community are starting to feel a bit tired of it. With all the hype and uncertainty surrounding AI, another

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Sunday, 07. April 2024

Lab Infra Rebuild Part 3

8 months ago | Source: R.I.Pienaar - www.devco.net

This is an ongoing post about rebuilding my lab infrastructure, see the initial post here.

Today I’ll talk a bit about Configuration Management having previously mentioned I am ditching Kubernetes.

Server Management

The general state of server management is pretty sad, you have Ansible or Puppet and a long tail of things that just can’t work or are under terrible corpor

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Thursday, 21. March 2024

Lab Infra Rebuild Part 2

9 months ago | Source: R.I.Pienaar - www.devco.net

Previously I blogged about rebuilding my personal infra, focussing on what I had before.

Today we’ll start into what I used to replace the old stuff. It’s difficult to know where to start but I think a bit about VM and Container management is as good as any.

Kubernetes

My previous build used a 3 node Kubernetes Cluster hosted at Digital Ocean. It hosted:


Cranky community members

9 months ago | Source: binford2k.com

You know the kind. There’s that one person who always has all the opinions. Sometimes there are many of them. But they’re critical about that thing you built, or the workflow you designed, or that issue that you haven’t responded to since they filed it last year. Especially if you hear it long enough, this criticism can cut deeply.

Technical Open Source community members always have some

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Wednesday, 20. March 2024

Lab Infra Rebuild Part 1

9 months ago | Source: R.I.Pienaar - www.devco.net

I’ve been posting on socials a bit about rebuilding my lab and some opinions I had on tools, approaches and more. Some people have asked for a way to keep up with my efforts, so I figured it might be time to post here for the first time since 2018!

In this post I’ll focus on what came before, a bit of a recap of my previous setup. Additionally, to a general software refresh I

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Tuesday, 27. February 2024

Recovering archived Puppet blog posts

9 months ago | Source: binford2k.com

The Puppet blog has long been a treasure trove of content. You never knew what you might find; a product announcement, an industry analysis, a user interview, a technical post. And it never deleted content, so people got into the habit of linking to blog posts to use as reference or documentation.

This was really great in a lot of ways, but it came with its downsides. Outdated content d

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Monday, 19. February 2024

Meine erste Woche bei Betadots

10 months ago | Source: betadots

2024-02-13

Die erste Woche fing fulminant an mit einem Besuch beim Configuration Management Camp in Belgien in Gent. Ich bin in CCC-Kreisen unterwegs und das CfgMgmtCamp ist den CCC-Veranstaltungen ziemlich ähnlich - haufenweise Leute in ungezwungener Kleidung, an jeder Ecke ein Gesprächspartner, der mehr zu deinem Thema weiß als du selbst. Die Vortragsauswahl war deutlich schwankender,

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Monday, 05. February 2024

Scaling Puppet Infrastructure

10 months ago | Source: betadots

In large environments with many nodes one must take care of Puppet server scaling.
When and if scaling is needed, depends on the number of nodes and on code complexity and size.
This article describes the different ways of tuning Puppet server infrastructure.

Table of content:

  1. Puppet Server tuning
    1. Performance tuning a single node
    2. Scaling horizont

      [ Read More ]

Thursday, 25. January 2024

HDM Foreman integration

11 months ago | Source: betadots

Analyzing Hiera Data can be very difficult.
HDM - Hiera Data manager is a web UI, which let's you analyze Hiera Data in a user-friendly way.

We now have built and released the HDM Foreman integration, which consists of two packages:

  • Foreman HDM Smart Proxy plugin: smart_proxy_hdm
  • Foreman HDM plugin: foreman_hdm
HDM Foreman Smart Proxy

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Friday, 19. January 2024

Emerging from a year long apnoea

11 months ago | Source: Example 42

The last post on example42’s blog was from December 2022, more than a year ago. I was introducing tp desktop which is a quick and easy way to manage your desktops with Puppet and I was actively working on the new version of Tiny Puppet which was expecting to deliver the huge promise of being able to install EVERY application on EVERY Operating System (this is already happening for years) in EVERY

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Wednesday, 03. January 2024

Puppet container version schema update

11 months ago | Source: betadots

Community: we hear you!

Several people have asked to please change the version schema on puppetserver-container and puppetdb-container.

Puppet Inc version schema

Prior the repositories have been handed over from Puppet Inc to Puppet Community, the container images were using the Puppet server and PuppetDB versions, which were used inside the container.

              

              

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