Manageable Puppet Infrastructure

People who are implementing Puppet for the first time have to deal with quite a steep learning curve. They have their hands full with learning the language, creating modules and finding their way around a drastically changed way of working. Most of them do not have the experience required to set up a scalable and manageable Puppet infrastructure from the start.

There are hundreds of Puppet howto’s scattered around the web. They all have one thing in common: One single aspect of a Puppet infrastructure is highlighted and implemented.

I have not found any that forges the available tools together in a manageable Puppet infrastructure, including workflows to get the daily work done.

This series combines a presentation with technical howto’s and workflows that can be put to immediate use. This design has evolved in my Puppet consultancy.

The technical setup presented here is very flexible and suits the majority of the implementations. It is fit for use with Puppet Enterprise ànd open source and will facilitate collaboration without adding much overhead.

Getting started

I would recommend that you first watch my presentation to get an impression of the capabilities of workflow of this setup. Next, you can implement the setup for yourself by following the howto.

Links:

• Slides and Presentation at FOSDEM (Short version)
• Setting up the Infrastructure
• Role module and using Hiera to load them… TODO
• Company-specific module (Incl. Wrapper classes)… TODO
• Creating a new module
• Adding a Contributor/Clone Project
• The Workflow
• Adding a new development environment
• Managing multiple customers within a single environment
• Nice additions to Have