{"id":411,"date":"2024-09-11T17:18:19","date_gmt":"2024-09-11T17:18:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/questy.org\/?p=411"},"modified":"2024-10-31T16:12:57","modified_gmt":"2024-10-31T16:12:57","slug":"puppet-primer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/questy.org\/index.php\/2024\/09\/11\/puppet-primer\/","title":{"rendered":"Puppet Primer I – What is Puppet?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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One of the perennial problems with a platform like Puppet is not the lack of documentation in and of itself, but moreso the lack of various levels of documentation at all levels of documentation consumer.<\/em> What I mean by this is, we may have a lot of documentation available (take the veritable encyclopedia of data at https:\/\/puppet.com\/docs), but we may not actually have access to beginner-level accessible<\/em><\/strong> data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What do I mean by “accessible”?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most of the professional documentation I’ve encountered around the Puppet ecosystem is produced by brilliant<\/strong> engineers. Oftentimes, though, as we progress forward in our development on any<\/em> platform, we tend to forget from where we came, and the level of knowledge we might have had at our earliest stages of development. As a result, we get really<\/strong> advanced documentation that is trying to be apprehended by the novice user.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This series will attempt to alleviate some of that. It should be noted that the majority of the work in this series of documentation will be on Puppet Community.<\/em> Where possible, when documentation features or functions, I will link official documentation, Puppet Git projects, or some other foundation for the assertions and documentation that I am making.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is Puppet<\/strong>?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

First and foremost, we should answer the question “What is Puppet”. Now, generally, when we come to this question, many have already answered that question, and are likely looking here for advanced information. However, since this is a primer, we will cover that here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When we talk about Puppet, we’re not talking about these guys:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Muppets<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n


What we’re talking about is an automation platform used by System Administrators and Engineers (primarily) to automate their work at scale. In the past, SysAdmins would keep a list of hosts they managed locally in text files or in SSH session management software like PuTTY<\/a>. Through any number of mechanisms tht would allow them to automate procedures across n+1 nodes. In some cases 5-10 at a time, and in other cases hundreds or thousands. However, there were problems…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With hundreds or thousands of nodes, you could only “chunk” your actions into groupings between 20-40 at a time, and many times the commands you would execute would be performed in a serial fashion, taking time during which you would have an environment that was not fully in sync. Therefore, people could conceivably reach resources that have had changes, refresh a browser or a thin client, and get an entirely different experience, feature set, or even data. This was no good.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Additional problems would be that as your fleet grew or shrunk, the lists of nodes you have may become out of sync, and if you had multiple engineers, your lists may be out of sync with each other, causing coverage issues when trying to make changes to your environment. Maybe some engineers were using one set of scripts or node lists, and another was using different scripts or node lists, and perhaps the functionality between them differed. This made for a lack of predictability in how an environment was configured and\/or was functioning, and would conceal states of “drift” from node to node.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Enter Puppet<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Puppet’s creator, Luke Kanies, found this disarray noted above in the System Administration space, and decided to create Puppet. You can learn a bit more about the early days and development of Puppet from an O’Reilly interview with Luke here:
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