Sunday, May 19, 2013

Puppet Camp SFO Covers Cloud Automation, Scaling Puppet, and Pushups

https://puppetlabs.com/blog/puppet-camp-sfo-covers-cloud-automation-scaling-puppet-and-pushups/

Sunday, May 19, 2013 9:33 AMPuppet Camp SFO Covers Cloud Automation, Scaling Puppet, and PushupsPuppet LabsKara Sowles

PuppetCamp SF is in the books. We had a great day of presentations and community at the Google campus, covering everything from cloud automation to running Puppet at scale.


Automating CloudStack Infrastructure

Dave Nalley presented on using Puppet to express your CloudStack infrastructure as a service platform in code. This concept is experimental but it's pretty awesome and works quite well. The end-result looks something like this.

cloudstack_instance { 'fooserv':    ensure   => present,    image    => 'CentOS 6.3',    flavor   => 'm1.medium',    network  => 'my_net',  }

Being able to codify all components of your infrastructure, including the compute, disk and network resources can be really liberating. The real gravy comes with Puppet's ability to inspect the current state of these resources and make corrections based on the actual state of reality. Other efforts in this space include resource-based management of Google Compute andJuniper networking devices.  Check out Puppet Resource Types & Providers for CloudStack.

Community Takeaway: You Love Git, You Love the Forge

"Have you used the Forge?"

<ALL HANDS UP>

"Anyone familiar with Puppet Resource Shell?"

<one hand>

"Who has contributed modules to Puppet Forge?"

<1-2 hands max?>

"Git users?"

<Nearly the entire room>

<Almost all of them using GitHub>

"Svn users?"

<half dozen>

"Perforce?"

<one hand>

Just some of the things we learned when Puppet Forge product owner Ryan Coleman delivered a talk on the Forge and some good practices to follow when building Puppet modules.

You can check out his presentation on the modules and the Puppet Forge, and check out this list of  awesome modules he recommended:

Manage Your Macs With Puppet and Box

GitHub has a lot of developers with Macs who want to quickly get up to speed with the development environment and ship code. The team at GitHub built a tool around Puppet called Boxen, which aims to ease the automation of your development environment. It's got all the power of Puppet coupled together with some handy tricks and pre-made modules for managing macs. Will Farrington gave an awesome presentation on what Boxen is all about and how to get started.   Will did an awesome job of laying out the problem facing operations folk when faced with an army of developers trying to write and ship code from their laptops. They've built a great tool for helping their company succeed with low friction,  and the fully-memed story really resonated with the audience. Check it out.

StubHub Scales Puppet to 5,000 Agents

Following Will was Russ Johnson from StubHub. StubHub is growing fast and Russ built Puppet up in a grassroots effort to help the business keep up with demand. He delivered a talk on his lessons learned in scaling to 5000 Puppet agents. Lessons range from how he's deploying modules to his production Puppet masters to his favorite VIM plugins to make module development quick and painless.

Dropbox On Functional Hostnames

Finally, Andrew Fong & Gary Josack from Dropbox gave a talk on their use offunctional hostnames and lessons learned using them with Puppet.Basing your node classification logic on predictable hostnames can be really powerful but it's not without challenges.

The day ended with a drink and snack social provided by Google. This was hands-down the best spread I've seen at a PuppetCamp.  Google set us up with tons of hot and cold snacks, every drink you could ask for and all the hospitality we could handle. Everyone seemed to have a great time talking about infrastructure while soaking in that amazing view.

Thanks to everyone who came out to Puppet Camp San Francisco – and to all those who weren't able to make it, we hope to see you in lovely San Francisco for PuppetConf in August!

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