Puppet Labs Blog

I'd recommend puppet or ansible. http://ansible.cc/ http://puppetlabs.com/

I know it's kind of tangential, but one of the MASSIVE benefits of using EC2 and clouds for hosting is the simplicity of provisioning new machines when problems occur (nodes dying, high traffic, etc.). One attitude to take when using Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is to always expect failure - nodes can easily disappear when a problem occurs and take out your entire website. The best backup plan you can have for this is to capture the entire configuration of your stack in some version controlled way. One of the tools I use for this falls under the domain of "configuration management", with the best products being Chef[1] or Puppet[2], or just writing a normal bash script that installs your Rails stack and checks out your code from github. When utilizing these technologies, I usually do the following: 1. Create a virtual image that has your CM tools + dependencies installed on it. 2. Add a bootstrap script that runs at boot (usually /etc/rc.local on Linux). This script will acquire and parse user-data[3] that is provided in the provisioning request to EC2[4], an then kick off your main configuration logic. 3. Capture the image and use it as your base image that you perform deployments from. Feel free to let me know if you have any questions with this method! It's a bit overkill at the learning phases of IaaS clouds and OS administration, but it will save you a TON of time down the road as a programmer. [1] Chef: http://www.opscode.com/chef/ [2] Puppet:…

Sensu was originally built to solve the problem of having to monitor ephemeral nodes[1], now however, it's a a versatile monitoring platform. I would argue that it's much more than just what it was originally designed for. Regarding RabbitMQ and difficulty in debugging: it's true. You can now use Redis as a transport if you like. I'm sure support for other transports will be added in time, too. 1. https://puppetlabs.com/presentations/puppet-sensu-love-infrastructure-…

What's the benefit of Guix compared to tools like Chef (https://www.getchef.com/) or Puppet(https://puppetlabs.com/)?

2cents about this: 1. If you are setting up Sentinel with puppet you can do audit of a file instead of modifying it on every run http://puppetlabs.com/blog/all-about-auditing-with-puppet this way you can install, configure and start sentinel and puppet will notice that the content changed. You can decide if you want to change the file or if you would like puppet to notice about it. 2. About sentinel, don't know how you are triggering the failover but we discovered a bug on versions prior to 2.8.12 on manual failovers, https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/redis-db/rhommel/redis-db/O… so it was fixed in 2.8.12 and never seen redis taking more than a second.

Read The Visible Ops Handbook [1], implement what they talk about, it is an easy read too. On the tools site: puppet [2]. Puppet allows you to bake these controls into your infrastructure and monitor if things change. p.s. I also read "The Phoenix Project" [3] a couple days ago and it give some good ideas on how to stop in insanity. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Ops-Handbook-Implementing-Practical/dp/0… [2] https://puppetlabs.com/ [3] http://www.amazon.ca/The-Phoenix-Project-Business-ebook/dp/B00AZRBLHO

We use Chef, many people run Puppet. http://www.opscode.com/chef/ https://puppetlabs.com/

Interesting product. But wow, your website really looks like http://puppetlabs.com/ in color scheme and layout, but most especially the logo.

It seems to be vanilla Ubuntu 11.10 server. And yes, you’d use something like puppet[1]. [1] http://puppetlabs.com/

Edit: Please disregard my comment. Puppet does a lot more than simple deployment scripts. See http://www.puppetlabs.com/ for more information. Can someone please explain the advantages of deploying with Puppet over Fabric. (Fabric is a Python library for writing deployment scripts.)

We (correction, I) keep dual names on all our machines. First the descriptive name lb01, websrv01, db01, etc. The second is the informal name all based on constellations and other space based entities like earth, star, taurus, corvus, leo, etc. Via Puppet[1], the MOTD of each server is generated with figlet[2] and other information so that the machine can be identified using all of it's names. Most likely it's overkill - but I do like my pretty names as well. [1] http://www.puppetlabs.com/ [2] http://www.figlet.org/

I'm a little sad because most of these issues (as I understand your description them) are already fixed or well underway :( It's probably too late for your specific case but I'd like to reply anyway since a lot of this is "conventional wisdom" based on old information. Full disclosure: I'm the product owner for Puppet and before I worked here, I ran it in large-scale production since 2008. Not quite sure what you mean by 'native support', but gem and pip package providers are built-in. there are high-quality modules for git (puppetlabs-vcsrepo), virtualenv (stankevich-python), npm (puppetlabs-nodejs), etc -- it's a design decision to move much of this into modules and out of core so they can iterate faster. Totally agree that loops make many language constructs much easier, and there's looping in the rewritten parser -- https://docs.puppetlabs.com/puppet/3.6/reference/experiments_lambdas.h… -- which will be on by default in the next semver major. While the model definitely wants you to describe relationships between resources if you need to send subscribe/refresh messages, there's toggle-able ordering algorithms that will let you run them in manifest order -- I blogged about it here: http://puppetlabs.com/blog/introducing-manifest-ordered-resources The parser and evaluator are undergoing a total rewrite to be an expression based grammar, which is explicitly to make better definition around the language and eliminate the gotchas --…

Your design just looks like http://puppetlabs.com !!!

I'm going to comment solely on the adoption of Dev Ops, which I personally consider to include change management, incident management, deployment, monitoring, metrics, and file distribution. I believe that the barrier to adopting solid Dev Ops practices is so low that for most startups, adopting them early is a smart move. Sure, today, your startup doesn't need to use Puppet or Chef to ensure that all of your servers (whether they're VMs or baremetal) are running the same pieces of software with the same configuration files, because manually installing those is easy. Once those same VMs have had features X, Y, and Z added to them, and files have been changed over and over, and then all of a sudden, you need more servers because your startup has been featured on Hacker News, you're probably going to need to re-invent the wheel and figure out all of those steps that you've done to your initial servers. Puppet and Chef make consistency across your entire environment possible, and getting them up and running is not difficult. Puppet (and probably Chef, although I'm not Chef fluent) can be run in serverless mode, if desired, too, which makes the installation and use even easier. If you manually manipulate your servers now, you're going to need to automate later. You might as well spend a little time creating your "Dev Ops way" now, so that when tomorrow comes, you'll be spooling up identical servers that are monitored and have metrics coming out of them, you won't break a…

Puppet Labs is trying to rock the DevOps/Sysadmin world with our model-driven approach to config management. We're based in Portland, OR, and aren't looking for remote workers as yet. We're looking for both Core Developers and Pro Services Engineers, and no matter what, you'll be working with open source software and a highly engaged user community, as well as on a project that is included in most of the major *nix distributions in one way or another. Puppet itself is written entirely in Ruby, so strong experience in Ruby is great, but experience in an equivalently flexible language is fine too. We've recently moved into our new offices: http://twitpic.com/3ckay1 http://twitpic.com/3cksg3 (things are more organized than that now :) Portland is freaking awesome. I moved up here recently after working for Google in the Bay Area, and I couldn't be happier. Cheap rent, amazing food and beer, huge bike culture and a city full of incredibly friendly and nice people. http://www.puppetlabs.com/company/jobs/

This brief writeup from Puppet Labs seems to answer most of the questions I had about the nature and usefulness of the technology released. https://puppetlabs.com/blog/nsa-release-system-integrity-management-pl…

It's not LaTeX, but a historian recently posted on HN his work flow for using plaintext and Pandoc for writing papers [1]. I've been using markdown+pandoc [2] for a book of stories for my family. TeX/LateX exerts nearly absolute (albeit, gorgeous) control over layout, whereas e-book readers often provide the reader with many configurable layout options. Thus, e-book formats tend towards a content-with-minimal-layout-hints way of handling layout. I'm finding markdown plus pandoc a good fit for the latter. [1] http://wcm1.web.rice.edu/my-academic-book-in-plain-text.html [2] https://puppetlabs.com/blog/automated-ebook-generation-convert-markdow…

I thought it was more like Razor from PuppetLabs. http://puppetlabs.com/solutions/next-generation-provisioning

Oh yes, I forgot about the legendary Ruby On Rails code quality: http://puppetlabs.com/security/cve/cve-2013-0277

And the linear top/down flow, also known as manifest ordering, is now available with Puppet. See http://puppetlabs.com/blog/introducing-manifest-ordered-resources

How would you compare Terraform to something like Razor? I think it might be a good one to add to your "vs Other Software" section: http://puppetlabs.com/solutions/next-generation-provisioning

I have pretty much the same setup at my work too. It goes Gitlab->Jenkins->Puppetmaster. This works super well with Puppet dynamic environments, since each team member can have their own branch to mess around in and make mistakes. On our master branch you have to pass puppet parser validate and puppet-lint before things get to production, which helps cut down on errors. http://puppetlabs.com/blog/git-workflow-and-puppet-environments

Can I ask why you chose GPL for Ansible? This makes it more challenging to integrate or embed Ansible in many types of commercial or non-GPL projects. Chef [1] and Puppet [2] both chose the Apache license. Salt did as well. If you were worried about competitors offering hosted versions of Ansible, I could understand going AGPL, but not GPL3. Thanks! [1]: http://www.opscode.com/blog/2009/08/11/why-we-chose-the-apache-license… [2]: https://puppetlabs.com/apache/

The Ruby DSL for puppet has been around for a couple years, and recently got some improvements as part of GSoC. http://puppetlabs.com/blog/ruby-dsl/ http://puppetlabs.com/blog/gsoc-project-ruby-dsl-for-puppet/

The rest of the PuppetConf 2012 videos can be found here: http://puppetlabs.com/community/videos/puppetconf/

You can use Puppet to pre-bake your AMIs for you so you can scale very rapidly and still use configuration management to maintain your instances http://puppetlabs.com/blog/rapid-scaling-with-auto-generated-amis-usin…

working link: http://puppetlabs.com/blog/the-problem-with-separating-data-from-puppe…

Puppet Labs in Portland, OR, is hiring for several new positions on our Technical Operations team: * Support Engineer - Linux/Unix SysAdmin background preferred * Technical Writer - 3+ years experience required * Technical Training Manager - 10+ years experience in technical training management role with experience training IT professionals in Linux/Unix based programs We are also hiring an Intern for our Release Engineering team for a 16 week paid assignment. In addition, we're always looking for strong Professional Services Engineers and Software Developers as our team continues to grow in 2012. Note: Senior PSEs can be based out of remote offices anywhere in the US, not just Portland. For more information on these positions and to apply online, please go to http://www.puppetlabs.com/jobs. Thanks! Aimee Fahey Talent Acquisition Manager Puppet Labs

"Pro Puppet" is a good one to start with for the Puppet side of things. http://puppetlabs.com/blog/pro-puppet-a-handy-indexed-guide/