The Puppet Applied conference, held in San Diego from October 19-21, 2023, focuses on delivering high-quality Puppet modules and performance tuning strategies for Puppet and Puppet Enterprise installations. The event features sessions led by various experts discussing topics such as automation, monitoring, network automation, and the use of advanced Puppet techniques for scalability. Attendees will learn about the latest Puppet Enterprise roadmap and how to effectively implement DevOps practices within their organizations.

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Track Overview:
Puppet Applied
19 - 21 October
San Diego

2. Delivering Premium Quality
Modules: Using Beaker and
VMpooler for Multi-Platform
Testing
In 2014 KPN decided to use Puppet to manage thousands of its
customers' servers. To guarantee a smooth transition to a
puppetized infrastructure we needed to deliver high-quality
modules. To that end we implemented a puppetized CI pipeline that
included full acceptance tests on all target platforms (Linux AND
Windows). In this session we'll take a closer look at the Jenkins,
Beaker and VMpooler setup we use to provide this test
environment. We'll talk about technical challenges and other
lessons learned during this project.
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Thursday, October 20 | 11:15 am
Dimitri Tischenko
Rene Last
Puppet Applied
Automation Architect, Myndrik
System Administrator, KPN B.V.

3. An Introduction to Measuring and
Tuning PE Performance
I hope my audience will leave this talk with an understanding of how to
monitor and tune performance for both Puppet and PE installations.
Specific topics include:
3
Thursday, October 20 | 1:30 pm
Charlie Sharpsteen
Puppet Employee, Puppet
Puppet Applied
● JVM memory limits and how to manage them using Puppet.
● How to monitor and tune Puppet Server to manage JRuby
usage and profile catalog compilation.
● How to monitor and tune PuppetDB to manage command
queue depth and database disk usage.
● How to tune the Enterprise console to manage the demands of
classifier sync.
● How to tune agents using splay and direct puppet such that
Puppet infrastructure is used efficiently.

4. Automating Datastore Fleets With
Puppet
Yelp's PaaS based on Mesos is nice for deploying stateless
application services, but we've found Puppet to be our tool of
choice for managing clusters of heavily stateful applications like
Zookeeper, Cassandra, and Elasticsearch, while supporting a high
degree of configuration diversity. In this talk, I'll show how we have
built "cluster native" Puppet modules for flexibility and scale. Our
design allows us to:
4
Thursday, October 20 | 2:30 pm
Joseph Lynch
Software Engineer, Yelp
● Configure instances of a cluster independently, while still
sharing core automation.
● Dynamically scale clusters up and down as needed within
minutes.
● Provide control and tooling over these clusters to
developers themselves. Along the way I'll show how you
can tie together advanced Puppet techniques like Module
Hiera Data, ENC, and custom types/functions to create
robust automation.
Puppet Applied

5. Watching The Puppet Show
With Puppet, you can declare what you want your infrastructure to look
like and Puppet will take action, making the necessary changes to bring
it to fruition. How do you know if your Puppet declarations have
produced a working stack? Will future changes impact the health of
your stack? In this presentation, I will discuss common pitfalls and
failure cases when using Puppet to manage infrastructure and services,
and how they can be mitigated or avoided with monitoring. I will talk
about Sensu, a monitoring tool designed from the ground up to work in
conjunction with Puppet. I will explain how Puppet and Sensu interact
with one another to help produce reliable services. This presentation
will include examples of Puppet & Sensu configuration and code.
5
Thursday, October 20 | 3:45 pm
Sean Porter
Engineer, Heavy Water Operations
Puppet Applied

6. Device-Based Modules -
Making Them as Simple as a
Light Switch
Puppet 4 has been out for a year and a half and you still
have a Puppet 3 installation you need upgraded. We'll
examine the benefits of upgrading and lay out a plan to
make it happen. Many have been through the school of
hard knocks, and we'll use that knowledge to make our
own journey enjoyable. This session will cover both
Puppet FOSS and Enterprise editions.
6
Thursday, October 20 | 4:45 pm
DevOps Engineer, Puppet
TP Honey
Puppet Applied

7. Testing and Delivering Puppet
Have you, a Puppet user, ever wondered how Puppet ships software?
My goal here is to be fearlessly transparent and share the way we
apply practices from the scientific method, and continuous delivery to
deliver Puppet and friends on 80+ platform targets. This is a
walk-through in DevOps and software delivery workflows. I'll trace the
process of building out a new platform within the ecosystem which
includes lifecycle selection, toolchain management, test tiering, and
work scheduling. I'll take some planned detours into some of our freely
available tools, including Vanagon and VMpooler. Weaved throughout
the presentation are the roles people and teams play, how each
person contributes to getting the bits out on time, and how our
processes have evolved over the last five years.
7
Friday, October 21 | 11:15 am
Michael Stahnke
Director of Engineering, Puppet
Puppet Applied

8. Why Network Automation Matters,
and What You Can Do About It
Network automation presents a series of unique challenges for
vendors and customers alike. In this session we will discuss the
similarities and differences of network versus traditional systems
administration. There will be real world examples of the complexity
and scale of network configurations with an emphasis of separating
the "how" from the "what". I also intend to demonstrate how Puppet is
accelerating the depth of network automation by bridging the power of
the Puppet language with YANG network data models.
8
Friday, October 21 | 2:30 pm
Rick Sherman
Sr. Release Engineer, Puppet
Puppet Applied

9. Puppet Enterprise Roadmap and
How to Succeed With It
Puppet Enterprise is more than just Puppet Open Source +
Support. If you’re a Puppet Enterprise user today, or interested in
amplifying your success with Puppet broadly across your
organization, this is the session for you. We will explain what's new
and what's coming up in Puppet Enterprise and also illustrate how
its features work together to solve your problems.
9
Friday, October 21 | 3:45 pm
Lindsey Smith
Susannah Axelrod
Director of Product Management, Puppet
Product Manager, Puppet
Puppet Applied

10. Want to explore more PuppetConf
sessions?
View our full agenda and other tracks at
puppet.com/puppetconf

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Puppet Applied:
Speakers
19 - 21 October
San Diego

12. Rene Last
System Administrator, KPN B.V.
Rene - Born and raised in the Netherlands, got a computer
science degree in Enschede. Rene has been working at KPN
since 2007. Initially as a sysadmin. Later became a technical
consultant. Rene now works in KPNs Tooling & Automation
team where he is responsible for delivering and maintaining
puppetmasters and various puppet related services for teams
within KPN.

13. Dimitri Tischenko
Automation Architect, Myndrik
Born in St Petersburg, Russia, moved to The Netherlands at
13, got into computing at 18. Graduated from Delft University
of Technology with an MSc degree in Computer Science.
Co-founded Proteon in 1995, a managed hosting company.
Discovered and implemented puppet in 2009. Since 2013 a
free-lance "Puppetmaster". In 2015/2016 Puppet Team Lead
at KPN, working on a central Puppet Infrastructure involving
thousands of nodes. Currently Automation Architect at
Aegon, helping adopt Devops culture, processes and tools.
Dances and teaches Argentine Tango.

14. Charlie Sharpsteen
Puppet Employee, Puppet
Charlie Sharpsteen is a Principal Support Engineer at Puppet
where he spends his time pulling products apart to figure out
how things work and how they can be re-built to work better.
In his spare time, Charlie can be found contributing to Open
Source projects in the Puppet Ecosystem, tinkering with
virtual infrastructure, and exploring the Pacific Northwest.

15. Joseph Lynch
Software Engineer, Yelp
Joseph Lynch is a software engineer for Yelp who focuses on
building datastore and service infrastructure. Joey is a core
contributor to Yelp’s datastore platform which has allowed
Yelp to go from a primarily MySQL data tier to a Polyglot
data tier including Elasticsearch, Cassandra, and Zookeeper.
He loves pushing the edge of how Yelp uses Puppet to
automate infrastructure and never met a problem he didn’t
want to automate away. When not wrangling clusters of
datastores, he enjoys building service discovery, reliable
communication, fast deployment, and monitoring into Yelp’s
SOA.

16. Sean Porter
Engineer, Heavy Water Operations
Sean Porter is a toolsmith with a love for composable
systems. He is a practitioner of passion driven development
with an appetite for a good post-mortem. As the author and
lead developer of Sensu, the open source monitoring
framework, he acts as the primary caretaker of its
community. Sean is a partner at Heavy Water Operations,
building Sensu Enterprise and helping people automate and
monitor their infrastructure.

17. TP Honey
DevOps Engineer, Puppet
TP has worked at Puppet for the last year and a half,
developing their supported modules. This includes working
with the puppet community on FOSS modules for Apache /
MySQL / Postgresql / Tomcat ... and also on device based
modules like the Netscaler / F5 / Netapp modules. Before
Puppet he was employed by F5 and BTI Systems. Then he
moved on to IBM, working in the security space developing
QVM - a networked vulnerability scanner, maintaining the
penetration tools.

18. Michael Stahnke
Director of Engineering, Puppet
Michael Stahnke is Director of Engineering at Puppet. He's
held a few roles and been a part of the company growing
from 35 to 440+ employees. While staying near the domains
of release engineering, operations, and community, he’s
been in leadership for most of the last decade. His interests
are building teams, mentoring team members, and playing
Hot Wheels cars with his son. He came to Puppet from
Caterpillar, Inc. where he was an infrastructure architect,
infrastructure team lead, and open source evangelist.
Michael also helped get the Extra Packages for Enterprise
Linux (EPEL) repository launched in 2005, authored of Pro
OpenSSH (Apress, 2005), and writes with some frequency
about technology and computers. @stahnma on twitter and
medium.

19. Rick Sherman
Sr. Release Engineer, Puppet
Rick Sherman (Shermdog) is a Senior Engineer at Puppet
driving the expansion of Network Platforms and Services.
Prior to joining Puppet he worked at Juniper Networks
supporting Identity and Policy management, and providing
automation frameworks for network engineers. Rick is
passionate about bridging the DevOps gap in networking and
moving the industry forward. Based in St. Louis, he prefers to
communicate via animated gifs and movie-related memes.

20. Susannah Axelrod
Director of Product Management, Puppet
Susannah joined Puppet in 2013 to build the product
management team and function. Prior to Puppet, she held
product leadership positions at Thomson Reuters, Sage
Software, Intuit and Intel Corp. She has also worked as a
marketing and strategy consultant for a diverse set of
technology companies.

21. Lindsey Smith
Product Manager, Puppet
Lindsey is a senior product manager at Puppet and nothing
makes him happier than talking with users to hear the good,
the bad and the ugly in their own words. He has been
working in the software industry since teaching himself to
program in junior high (highlights include cafeteria chain
trainee scheduling system and 4-H chicken judging score
management) as well as sysadmin jobs all through high
school and college. Software engineer roles and a Symantec
acquisition brought him to the Pacific Northwest and then on
to a startup where he transitioned into product management
responsibilities while scraping by as the Linux sysadmin.
Prior to Puppet he was technical product manager and then
product manager for security visualization and analytics at
Tripwire.

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