Puppet is a system configuration management tool that allows users to declaratively define system resources and their desired state. It uses a client-server architecture where Puppet clients periodically check in with a central Puppet master server to retrieve configuration instructions and enforce the de�ned resources and their states across multiple operating systems. Puppet aims to revolutionize system administration by making systems easy to manage at scale through its declarative approach and ability to scale across thousands of systems.

1. Systems Building Systems
A Puppet Story

3. What is Puppet?
Language Parser
Client/Server
Resource Abstraction
A few other things...

4. Luke
Kanies
Recovering Sysadmin

5. One Goal:
Revolutionize
System
Administration

6. What is a sysadmin?

7. Not Exactly Modern

8. Do tools have
to suck?

9. Say What?!??

10. Everything the Same
Everything Distinct

11. “Best Practices”

12. Don’t look at me...
I wasn’t the last one to touch it...

13. SSH Cfengine ?

14. Bad product,
hungry Luke

15. SSH Cfengine ?

16. SSH Cfengine ?

17. You can either easily manage
complex systems at scale...

18. You can either easily manage
complex systems at scale...
Or you can’t...

19. Who’s using Puppet?
“...at Google we're
currently using Puppet
to manage close to
6,000 Macs, and it's
likely our deployment
will expand
dramatically beyond
that....”

20. Competitive Advantage

21. People are finally figuring out
puppet and how it gets you
to the pub by 4pm. Note that
I've been at this pub since
2pm.
-- Jorge Castro

22. Enter Puppet...
Configuration Is
Declarative Code
Semantics Matter
Reproducible
Shareable
Maintainable
Extensible

23. Developer Sysadmin

24. Three
people
Developer Sysadmin

25. An Analogy
Programming SysAdmin
Low-level, commands
Assembly
non-portable and files
Abstract,
C* Resources
portable
* For small values of
abstract

26. Portable Resources
This:

27. Portable Resources
This:
Becomes:

28. Portable Resources
This:
Becomes:

29. Portable Resources
This:
Becomes:

30. Portable Resources
This:
Becomes:

31. Portable Resources
This:
Becomes:

32. Portable
23 package types
Users in NetInfo,
useradd, pw
Support for Debian,
Ubuntu, Red Hat,
Solaris, OS X,
Gentoo, SuSE,
FreeBSD, and more

33. Debian

34. Debian
Red Hat

35. Debian
Red Hat

38. Package

39. Configuration should
Package get modified after
package installation
Configuration

40. Configuration should
Package get modified after
package installation
Service should restart
Configuration when
configuration changes
Service

43. Idempotence...

44. Idempotence...

45. Idempotence...
Describes the property of operations in mathematics
and computer science which yield the same result after
the operation is applied multiple times.

49. Network Effects

50. Code
Puppetmasterd
puppetd puppetd
OS X in the
puppetd
cloud
Linux

51. Every Client:

52. Every Client:
Retrieve resource catalog from central
server

53. Every Client:
Retrieve resource catalog from central
server
Determine resource order

54. Every Client:
Retrieve resource catalog from central
server
Determine resource order
Check each resource in turn, fixing if
necessary

55. Every Client:
Retrieve resource catalog from central
server
Determine resource order
Check each resource in turn, fixing if
necessary
Rinse and repeat, every 30 minutes

56. Every Resource:

57. Every Resource:
Retrieve current state (e.g., by querying dpkg
db or doing a stat)

58. Every Resource:
Retrieve current state (e.g., by querying dpkg
db or doing a stat)
Compare to desired state

59. Every Resource:
Retrieve current state (e.g., by querying dpkg
db or doing a stat)
Compare to desired state
Fix, if necessary (or just log)

64. Image from http://flickr.com/photos/pingnews/132543603/

66. Questions?
andrew@reductivelabs
twitter.com/littleidea