On Tuesday, March 24th I woke up early and walked down the street to a regional Puppet Camp, this edition held not only in my home city of San Francisco, but just a few blocks from home. The schedule for the event can be found up on the Eventbrite page.

The event kicked off with a keynote by Ryan Coleman of Puppet Labs, who gave an overview of how configuration management tools like Puppet have shaped our current systems administration landscape. Our work will only continue to grow in scale as we move forward, and based on results of the 2014 DevOps Report more companies will continue to move their infrastructures to the cloud, where automation is key to a well-functioning system. He went on to talk about the work that has been going into Puppet 4 RC and some tips for attendees on how they can learn more about Puppet beyond the event, including free resources like Learn Puppet (which also links to paid training resources) and the Puppet Labs Documentation site, for which they have a dedicated documentation team working to make great docs.

Next up was a great talk by Jason O’Rourke of Salesforce who talked about his infrastructure of tens of thousands of servers and how automation using Puppet has allowed his team to do less of the boring, repetitive tasks and more interesting things. His talk then focused in on “Puppet Adoption in a Mature Environment” where he quickly reviewed different types of deployments, from fresh new ones where it’s somewhat easy to deploy a new management framework to old ones where you may have a lot of technical debt, compliance and regulatory considerations and inability to take risks in a production environment. He walked through the strategies they used to accomplished to make changes in the most mature environments, including the creation of a DevOps team who were responsible for focusing on the “infrastructure is code” mindset, use of tools like Vagrant so identical test environments can be deployed by developers without input from IT, the development of best practices for managing the system (including code review, testing, and more). One of the interesting things they also did was give production access to their DevOps team so they could run limited read/test-only commands against Puppet. This new system was then slowly rolled out typically when hardware or datacenters were rolled out, or when audits or upgrades are being conducted. They also rolled out specific “roles” in their infrastructure separately, from the less risky internal-only services to partner and customer-facing. The rest of the talk was mostly about how they actually deploy into production on a set schedule and do a massive amount of testing for everything they roll out, nice to see!

Jason O’Rourke of Salesforce

Tray Torrance of NCC Group rounded out the morning talks by giving a talk on MCollective (Marionette Collective). He began the talk by covering some history of the orchestration space that MCollective seeks to cover, and how many of the competing solutions are ssh-based, including Ansible, which we’ve been using in the OpenStack infrastructure. It was certainly interesting to learn how it integrates with Puppet and is extendable with Ruby code.

After lunch I presented a talk on “Puppet in the Open Source OpenStack Infrastructure” where I walked through how and why we have an open source infrastructure, and steps for how other organizations and projects can adopt similar methods for managing their infrastructure code. This is similar to some other “open sourcing all our Puppet” talks I have given, but with this audience I definitely honed in on the DevOps-y value of making the code for infrastructure more broadly accessible, even if it’s just within an organization. Slides here.

The next couple of talks were by Nathan Valentine and David Lutterkort of Puppet Labs. Nathan did several live demos of Puppet Enterprise, mostly working through the dashboard to demonstrate how services can be associated with servers and each other for easy deployment. David’s presentation went into a bit of systems administration history in the world before ever-present configuration management and virtualization to discuss how containerization software like Docker has really changed the landscape for testing and deployments. He walked through usage of the Puppet module for Docker written by Gareth Rushgrove and his cooresponding proof of concept for a service deployment in Docker for ASP.NET, available here.

The final talk of the day was by Aaron Stone (nickname “sodabrew”) of BrightRoll on “Dashboard 2 and External Node Classification” where he walked through the improvements to the Puppet Dashboard with the release of version 2. I myself had been exposed to Puppet Dashboard when I first joined the OpenStack Infrastructure team a couple years ago and we were using it to share read-only data to our community so we’d have insight into when Puppet changes merged and whether they were successful. Unfortunately, a period of poor support for the dashboard caused us to go through several ideas for an alternative dashboard (documented in this bug) until we finally settled on using a simple front end for PuppetDB, PuppetBoard. We’re really happy with the capabilities for our team, since read-only access is what we were looking for, but it was great to hear from Aaron about work he’s resumed on the Dashboard, should I have a need in the future. Some of the improvements he covered included some maintenance fixes, including broader support for newer versions of Ruby and updating of the libraries (gems) it’s using, an improved REST API and some UI tweaks. He said that upgrading should be easy, but in an effort to focus on development he wouldn’t be packaging it for all the distros, though the files (ie debian/ for .deb packages) to make this a task for someone else are available if someone is able to do the work.

In all, this was a great little event and the low ticket price of $50 it was quite the cost-effective way to learn about a few new technologies in the Puppet ecosystem and meet fellow, local systems administrators and engineers.

A few more photos from the event are here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157649225111213