PuppetConf 2013

Continuous deployment of puppet code feels like a holy grail; naive approaches are a minefield for stability. Code that works on existing machines but doesn’t work on newly provisioned machines is easy to write. Whilst there are tools like puppet-rspec to help with testing your code, they don’t help with system level tests. One way to solve this problem is to build an infrastructure and run end to end tests against it. This talk will cover the approach my team has taken to this; defined by the development cycle we wanted - test driven development, fast feedback and confidence in the repeatability of builds with an automated and continuous deployment pipeline to take changes from the first push through to production.

When trying to debug software problems it's critical to be able to reproduce the original situation, and Puppet Enterprise is no exception to this. The Puppet Labs support team needs a way to rapidly reproduce customer issues across a wide range of operating systems and various versions of Puppet Enterprise. Oscar is a set of Vagrant plugins that handles machine provisioning and configuration to install Puppet Enterprise. It's designed to make building a Puppet Enterprise as simple as running `vagrant up`. While Oscar was originally built for supporting Puppet Enterprise, it provides a general platform for developing and testing against Puppet Enterprise. This talk will go over the history of Oscar, the current state, how it's used, and where to get it.

An introduction to Continuous Delivery with a focus on Puppet and Operations teams - what is Continuous Delivery, why does my company or Development team want it, and what does it do for me? We'll focus on what you can do with Puppet now to enable an environment that encourages rapid iteration, how Operations can reach out to help Development get on this path (and what Development can ask for from Ops if they aren't helping out), and what Puppet is currently working on to make Continuous Delivery available to every organization.

This talk aims to show the value of rspec-puppet for those who come from a more Ops-centric background. The focus will be on using tests to go beyond just rewriting manifests in rspec. Instead the focus will be on scenarios like: - Are the baseline security measures in place? - Do the differences between dev and prod get reflected? - Are the config elements that are core to the application present? In addition, tests will help to be a place to help document the oddities of our configurations and ensuring that minor changes don't result in catastrophe.

A dive into the problems faced when first launching Puppet across existing, heterogeneous servers, outlining possible solutions using our experience as an example. In addition, this session will touch on application management and deployment using subversion and rake tasks, what works and what is a little rough around the edges.

A year ago, Puppet Labs had fewer than five fully packaged projects with disparate, difficult packaging workflows that took hours of manual work to accomplish identical results, with varying degrees of success. Since then, we have standardized workflow, added new products, expanded platform support, and removed manual steps (no more hand-crafted builds). This talk/workshop will describe how we have automated entire this process down to a single command from within the source code repo of most of our projects, enabling repeatable, automated packaging, and made packaging available to anyone using our projects’ source on github. This enables us to scale. Once upon a time adding new products to our release process was a major strain on the team.