PuppetConf 2014 – Day 1

I’m spending the week out in San Francisco for PuppetConf 2014. Puppet is a configuration management system used to help keep large collections of servers configurations in sync, as well as manage application deployment, users, and pretty much any other resource you can think of.

I’m here early because I’m taking one of their instructor-led training classes in order to fill in some of the blanks in my self-taught skill set. We had a rough start today because the wireless network that the hotel set up for us was not configured correctly for running training labs. It’s hard to spin up VMs on your laptops and get them on the network when you’re limited to one IP per vPort. We did finally get it working and are mostly caught up to where we should have been for today’s lesson plans.

After getting signed in and collecting my t-shirt, I headed up to my assigned classroom. We first worked through a review of some Puppet basics and then moved on to data structures like arrays and hashes and using virtual resources to simplify complex declarations. The class, and Puppet in general, are very Git centric, which is nice to see. Since you’re, in effect, turing your site’s configuration in to code, you need to put that code under some form of revision control, and Git is probably the best system out there. I’m not going to go down that rabbit hole, but seriously, it works really well.

The hotel’s facilities are really nice, with lots of meeting spaces for the classes and even some pretty good catering for breakfast and lunch. We finally broke for the day a little after 4:00 PM, and will be back tomorrow to do this all over again. I’m already filling in some of the blanks, and have a few modules at home that need to be rewritten…