Pulling the Strings

If you missed the recent Monitorama conference in Portland, highlighting the latest data monitoring technology, we’ve got you covered. Listen to Puppet Labs technical operations engineers Cody Herriges and Zach Leslie, technical operations project manager Derek Austin, community manager Kara Sowles and videographer Kent Bye discussing the conference in our most recent podcast.

You can learn about the tools our employees find most useful for monitoring; areas they’d like to see fleshed out at next year's Monitorama; challenges for the data monitoring sector; and their favorite talks (Hint: math and frequencies are involved.). We’re sure you’ll find the information stimulating and useful.

Meg Hartley is community coordinator at Puppet Labs.

• Monitorama videos

Have you heard of Beaker yet? Beaker is a testing tool developed and used here at Puppet Labs. In this podcast, Puppet Labs QA toolsmith Alice Nodelman, community member Richard Pijnenburg, and Puppet Labs module engineer Hunter Haugen join videographer Kent Bye and community initiatives manager Kara Sowles to talk about what Beaker does and how you can benefit from it.

Beaker is an acceptance-level testing tool that provisions a set of nodes to test on. Here at Puppet Labs, we can test Puppet on it, and we're also adopting it for automated module testing. Beaker can be used not only as an acceptance testing tool, but also as a cloud provisioner.

Listen in to learn about the problems Beaker addresses, how to better automate your testing, how we're using Beaker internally at Puppet Labs, and what's next for the tool. Richard chimes in with his use of Beaker, what tools he's used to decrease his test time from 5-plus hours to 45 minutes, and more details about his testing suite.

You can check out our other recent podcasts by visiting our podcast page or subscribing in your favorite podcast tool!

• Check out Beaker on GitHub.

Cloudera fans, rejoice! In this week’s Puppet podcast, Kent Bye and I talked to Mike Arnold, author of the Cloudera-certified CDH module, now available on the Puppet Forge. The CDH module deploys part of the Cloudera management stack, which can then be used to deploy Cloudera's Hadoop distribution onto a system.

Mike notes, "I know when I started four years ago it was, 'What's this Hadoop thing? What do you mean a Java-based file system, what's that?' It's been a great journey since then — things got very popular very quickly, and Hadoop seems to be on everyone's mind nowadays. It was a good way to add a skill set to my systems administrator cap that lets me do quite a lot of cool things with distributed clusters."

Mike's put a lot of work into this impressive module, and it's great to hear him talk more about it. If you're interested in learning more about provisioning Hadoop clusters with Cloudera Manager and Puppet, this podcast's for you.

You can find all of Mike's modules on the Puppet Forge under razorsedge.

You can also check our many other recent podcasts by visiting our podcast page or subscribing in your favorite podcast tool.

• Check out the CDH Module on the Puppet Forge.

I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Andy Parker and Henrik Lindberg to talk about some of the many upcoming changes to the Puppet language, which is our configuration language used to define resources (and more). We were joined by videographer Kent Bye, who also jumped in with a few of his own questions throughout the podcast.

We talked about a wide range of language topics, but we spent a little more time on a few of the more interesting upcoming changes. Andy's favorite improvement to the language is our new and vastly improved error reporting, now with error messages that actually help you figure out what went wrong! We also talked a lot about the new type system, which is something Henrik is pretty excited about. Support for templates and Heredoc are among the many other topics we discussed, so listen to the podcast and get all the details!

If you are as excited about these upcoming language features as Andy and Henrik, you can enable our experimental Future Parser and try them out now. If you aren't quite ready yet, you can still browse the Future Parser documentation to see what we are adding and how it will be used. You can also keep track of our progress and upcoming work by following the tickets filed under the DSL component in JIRA. Interested in joining the discussions about the future of the Puppet Language, or other development topics? You'll find those on the puppet-dev mailing list.

If you enjoy this podcast about the Puppet language, you should check out our podcast page for more great discussions, or subscribe in your favorite podcast tool.

• Listen to our other podcasts.

Razor developers David Lutterkort and Scott McClellan talk about what Razor is, and how it compares to other provisioning tools. Razor does just the right amount of work to get an operating system installed onto a bare-metal machine so it can be further configured and managed by Puppet Enterprise.

Razor has been rewritten from the ground up. David and Scott talk about the new features, as well as how it's being offered as a tech preview within Puppet Enterprise 3.2.

You can participate in Razor and join the discussions in the #razor IRC channel and the Razor Google group.

Listen in to learn about Razor’s new capabilities, and how you can provide feedback as you try it out. You can also check out our many other recent podcasts by visiting our podcast page or subscribing in your favorite podcast tool.

• Check out a hands-on demo of Razor

Applying for a tech job? In the latest Puppet Podcast, we chat with Mike Stahnke, director of software delivery at Puppet Labs, and Deepak Giridharagopal, our director of engineering. Mike and Deepak certainly aren't short on work, yet they regularly take the time to review resumes for people who apply for positions in their departments. As technical managers who are also hiring managers, Mike and Deepak provided an interesting perspective for those currently applying to tech jobs.

Hear tips for making your application stand out, extreme resume no-nos, and reflections on hiring from two of Puppet Labs' technical directors.

You can also check our many other recent podcasts by visiting our podcast page or subscribing in your favorite podcast tool.

• We're hiring! See Puppet Labs' ~ 40 open positions.

In this podcast, Kent Bye and I talked with James Fryman and Will Farrington about the many ways that GitHub is using Puppet.

We talked for quite a while about the creative ways that GitHub is using Boxen and Puppet to manage developer system configuration. I always think of Boxen as an easy way to quickly provision systems for new employees, but GitHub is doing some creative things with Hiera that makes it easy for people to maintain changes to their own configurations. It also helps to quickly roll out changes to everyone at the same time, like upgrades to a new version of Ruby, for example.

Because it's been a hot topic recently, we also talked about the recent DNS outage at GitHub. They gave us a few more details about what happened, and what they are doing with Puppet and their own testing processes to avoid similar issues in the future.

I won't ruin it by telling you too much more, so listen to the podcast to hear the rest! You can also check out our many other recent podcasts by visiting our podcast page or subscribing in your favorite podcast tool.

• Listen to our other podcasts. You can also download Puppet Labs podcasts on iTunes.

In this episode of the Puppet Labs Podcast, I was joined by Greg Larkin, who talked to us about his experience preparing for and taking the Puppet Professional certification exam. I was also joined by two people from the Puppet Labs education team: Jamie Rosa, who runs our certification program, and Brad Hamilton, who recently launched the Puppet Workshop, our new online learning portal.

We started by talking about our various certification exams, which are available at testing centers around the world. Greg became certified shortly after PuppetConf, and while he thinks that the best preparation is real-world Puppet implementation experience, he read a lot of documentation to help prepare for the exam. He also spent a lot of time answering questions on Ask.PuppetLabs.com — a great way to prepare for certification! Jamie also recommends reading the exam objectives and taking the practice exams, linked from the certification page.

We recently launched the Puppet Workshop, where you can find free, online courses on many different topics. Each course takes about 20 minutes to complete, and includes an instructional video, exercises and a quiz to test your knowledge. Right now, we have courses on a wide variety of topics about Puppet, PuppetDB, Hiera, modules, roles & profiles, plus so much more. We are also adding new courses on a regular basis, so we'll have even more courses in the next few months.

To get more information about our learning and certification programs, you should listen to the podcast! You can also check our many other recent podcasts by visiting our podcast page or subscribing in your favorite podcast tool.

• Listen to our other podcasts.