Pulling the Strings

This week on the Puppet Podcast, Kara and Kent are joined by Dan Lidral-Porter and Justin Holguin, engineers at Puppet Labs, to talk about the Puppet Node Manager. We've been excited about the Puppet Node Manager since before Dan stood onstage during Luke Kanies' PuppetConf Keynote and demo'd it, so we're thrilled to have him on the Puppet Podcast to tell you about it. In this podcast Dan and Justin dive into how Node Manager simplifies managing a large number of frequently changing systems while using Puppet Enterprise.

Puppet Node Manager is the first of the new Puppet Apps. With Puppet Node Manager, you can write rules based on the attributes of a node, and the rules will determine what that node should look like. You can manage your infrastructure based on each node's job, rather than name, without needing to manually classify each node.

Dan and Justin go in-depth on how to troubleshoot and resolve node conflicts when using node manager, and reveal where the tool is headed next. If you haven't tried out Puppet Node Manager, we hope this inspires you to give it a try!

• Check out the Puppet Apps

In today's installment of Conversations with Puppet Labs, Gareth Rushgrove shares how his team consolidated hundreds of separately hosted, separately created sites into a single website for the UK government.

If the task sounds daunting, it is ... But Gareth says his team wasn't attempting the impossible. Instead, they simply needed to focus on making lots of incremental improvements over time.

They created small, multidisciplinary teams, allowing them to make decisions quickly and deliver software on a daily basis. 

Gareth says his team used Puppet to simplify their work and focus on the bigger things they wanted to do: "Automation allowed us to move onto the next problem with confidence that what we'd done would work."

Listen to the podcast, and let us know what you think. And if you have a story about making positive changes on your ops team, we'd love to hear it. Email [email protected].

Theme music: "Smirking" by BenSoundBeats

Welcome back to the Conversations with Puppet Labs podcast, our second podcast channel where we're talking with people in the industry about what it means to be a change agent in IT operations, how to overcome resistance and how to alleviate pain points — for yourself and for your business.

This week, we're speaking with Kelsey Hightower, a developer advocate and toolsmith engineer at CoreOS. Kelsey says being a change agent comes with great responsibility and accountability, and while it's good for the team and organization, it can be self-serving too.

Kelsey notes the importance of identifying the right pain points to solve in order to have a positive impact on business goals.

You may be surprised to hear how Kelsey describes the mindset of a change agent ... listen in, and tell us if you agree.

Missed last week's episode? Listen to our conversation with Gene Kim.

If you have a story about making positive changes on your ops team, we'd love to hear it. Email [email protected].

Theme music: "Smirking" by BenSoundBeats

Have you used Geppetto? (Hint: it’s not Pinocchio’s creator.) Listen in to the Geppetto 4.2 edition of the Puppet Podcast to learn all about the latest release. Kent and Kara chat with Thomas Hallgren, the Puppet Labs engineer responsible for much of the work on 4.2.

Geppetto is an IDE, interactive development environment, tailor-made for editing modules and Puppet manifests and publishing git modules from the Puppet Forge. Thomas tells us more about IDE's and what makes Geppetto superior to others.

Geppetto can test your code as you create it. ”Geppetto keeps things live and runs builders to verify and link everything together and gives warnings. With Geppetto, you’ll have a Puppet ‘lint’ tool that’s running all the time and keeps a well defined model of everything that you’re editing in the workspace." Thomas explains.

Thomas finds the documentation tool tips and code completion helpful in this release. He illustrates the objectives for Geppetto 4.2, including support for new module metadata attributes, the new text based editor for metadata.json, improved module validation, and more.

Listen to find out:

• Recommendations for those writing their first module

Send us your thoughts, ideas, questions: [email protected]. (We love reading them!)

• Read

Want the details on what's new in PuppetDB 2.1.0, just released this week? Kara Sowles, community manager, and Kent Bye, video content marketer, sat down with software developers Ken Barber and Ryan Senior to chat about all of the new features in the 2.1.0 release of PuppetDB.

They’ve been hard at work on the new release and have lots to be excited about. Hint: this release is chock full of benefits for users.

Ryan and Ken are especially excited about the query engine. "We've spent a lot of time fixing inconsistencies and expanding the things you can query," said Ryan. "From a maintenance perspective, it's a big win for our developers, and from the functionality perspective, it's a big win for PuppetDB users."

Tune in for all this, plus little-known facts such as how PuppetDB got its name, and Spotify’s contributions to its development.

We’ll answer these questions:

• What is PuppetDB?

Have a question or comment? Email us at [email protected].

• Ken Barber’s PuppetDB blog post