Puppet Bolt handles inventories in a very flexible and powerful manner: you can combine static target definitions and different targets into a single inventory. For example, you can have an inventory which defines some static node names combined with the AWS inventory, or one that combines static nodes with the Vagrant inventory. Puppet Bolt inventory […]
The traditional way of managing systems with Puppet is to install Puppet agent on the nodes being managed and point those agents to a Puppet server (more details here). This approach works well for environments with tens or hundreds of nodes, but is an overkill for small environments with just a handful of nodes. Fortunately […]
The Using tags in Puppet Bolt aws_inventory target_mapping showed how to use AWS "Name" tag as the target name for Puppet Bolt. Use of tags can be extended to creating Bolt target groups: All you need to do is add a "filter" section with one filter. The "name" parameter tells Bolt that the filter is […]
Puppet feature environments are an excellent way to test code before deploying it, typically to production. They allow testing Puppet runs on no-operation mode across the whole node population managed by Puppet. There are sometimes cases where your code changes potentially impact many nodes and you're not exactly sure of their scope or effect. In […]
We're migrating away from Ansible to Puppet Bolt and the fact that Ansible updates broke the old ec2.py inventory script expedited that process. While that inventory script was quite rudimentary, it was able to automatically add human-readable names to the EC2 instance names. So, for example, you could target a node using "server_example_org" if the […]
Puppet resources like Package, File or Service are idempotent. In other words, you define the state of the resource and Puppet enforces it. The resources can be used in Bolt plans as well, which frees you from having to do state checks yourself. However, if the thing you're managing is not a Puppet resource you […]
When working with Puppet and Puppet modules in particular you quickly notice that there are several ways to manage module dependencies. Today I learned about a new way introduced in Puppet Bolt 3.x, so I thought I'd compile a list that celebrates this diversity: metadata.json: used primarily to dependency metadata to Puppet Forge. Some tools […]
The main annoyance with agent-based configuration management is the management of the agents themselves. They usually don't require any handholding after the initial install, except when you need to migrate them to a new environment. For example, migrate from a Puppet 5-based server to Puppet 6. The migration process is not overly difficult, but in […]
NOTE: this article is somewhat outdated. Please refer to Serverless Puppet with control repo, Hiera, roles and profiles and Puppet Bolt instead. Puppet Bolt is a designed to be an orchestration tool, but it can be used for configuration management as well. For example you may have a small environment of handful of nodes where […]
For the Finnish speakers out there here's a recording of our webinar held in co-operation with Turku Business Region on 5th May 2020: Infrastruktuurin rakentaminen koodilla We cover the very basics of infrastructure as code, version control, quality assurance techniques and tools such as Puppet, Terraform, Ansible and Puppet Bolt.
In the Puppet Bolt with a Puppet control repository blog post we showed how to integrate Puppet Bolt with an existing control repository. We used a static inventory file, which is ok for testing or when you have a few target nodes. However, if you have a Puppetserver running and are not using Bolt to […]
As discussed in the introductory post one of the use-cases for Puppet Bolt is orchestration - running actions on multiple targets in a certain order, possibly using results of actions or data from some targets on other targets. Orchestration with Bolt plans is quite easy: you just create a plan with multiple TargetSpec parameters, each […]
NOTE: this article is somewhat outdated. Please refer to Serverless Puppet with control repo, Hiera, roles and profiles and Puppet Bolt instead. Puppet Bolt is an orchestration tool similar to Ansible. It is suitable for multiple use-cases: Running ad hoc commands on target nodes. We use this approach for testing Puppet feature branches before approving […]
