Pulling the Strings

In this podcast, Eric talks with Bryan Belanger from Fervid about working with Puppet in highly regulated compute environments. As a consultant for US Government agencies, Bryan's been working to get "Authority to Operate" for governmental cloud services, to speed up time to delivery and reduce compliance risk. The Puppet modules for STIG hardening, especially for Windows servers, let them build a baseline from existing systems and enforce that across the environment. We talk about the Forge, about Cloud, and about... Canada! Windows hardening module: https://forge.puppet.com/autostructure/harden_windows_server *Eric is a technical product manager at Puppet.*

I hope to see you in Budapest, 4-5 June.Contributor Summit is just around the corner and we can't wait to catch up with you. Budapest will be beautiful in June and we've got two days of workshops, collaboration, hacking, and discussions on the present and future of Puppet projects lined up for you. For some of you, this will be the first time we've met face to face, and that's pretty exciting!And don't forget, Project Month is going on right now, and you'll have the opportunity to present your work at Summit. Maybe you'll even attract some contributors to help you out!We realize that international travel might sound like it requires sacks of cash, but since hotel and food are so affordable in Budapest, the total cost of the trip might be far less than you expect. Try a few searches on your favorite travel website to see for yourself!Don't forget to show up the evening before for the Vox Pupuli pinball party! More Info:• Contributor Summit• CS Project Month• Vox Pupuli pinball party *Ben Ford is a developer advocate, principal software engineer at Puppet.*

Vox Pupuli has long been the backbone of the open source Puppet community. But as often happens when a group is so capable and ubiquitous, sometimes the work done by individuals in the group goes unsung. In this episode, Eric and Hunter tell the story of their own involvement in the group and share some fun historical stories.Today's musical intro was recorded by Eric Putnam.*Ben Ford is a developer advocate at Puppet.*

One of Puppet’s big strengths is declarative automation – you model the desired end state of your infrastructure and Puppet does the hard work of enforcing it. This concept is quite powerful and has become the industry standard for configuration management. But sometimes your workflow doesn't quite fit into that pattern. Sometimes you really do need to deploy point-in-time changes, or mix imperative and declarative approaches together in a single workflow.With Bolt, we've learned from the lessons of Puppet and used those to design the next generation of infrastructure automation. Listen as Eric Sorenson and Yasmin Rajabi explain the tools of the future.The music in this episode is part of a live performance Eric Sorenson, Puppet Director of Product, prepared for Volt Divers. The full track is available here*Ben Ford is a developer advocate at Puppet.*

It seems like every day is another paradigm shift anymore. SaaS, PaaS, configuration management, cloud native, immutable infrastructure, serverless, and so on. But one has to ask, what do we lose by always chasing the bleeding edge? Information hiding, API contracts, and other ways of abstracting away implementation details are all part of solid system architecture. Are there patterns from yesterday that we should continue applying towards the new ways of working today and tomorrow?George Pandzik (@DevOpsFables) thinks so, and he's here to talk about patterns that he doesn't think should be lost to the sands of time.*Ben Ford is a developer advocate at Puppet.*

We're all familiar with Puppet's main forte; that of managing configuration for computers, servers, cloud instances, etc. But as with any tool, community members often… color outside the lines.Carrying on with our community spotlight series, this episode highlights one of those unusual usages. Corey Osman started this project by using Puppet to manage tiny IoT devices but ended up building a whole management framework out of Puppet and Bolt technologies. Let's get started and hear his story.Today's musical intro was recorded by Manny, a software engineer on our hosted services team.*Ben Ford is a developer advocate at Puppet.*

We're kicking off 2019 with a bang and a series of spotlights on notable community members and their achievements. We've got some great shows lined up for you, from useful development tools, to community experiences, to lessons we could learn from the history of computing. Let's get started today with Corey Osman of Portland, Oregon who's built a command line REPL. This quick screencast shows some of the capabilities of the tool:A REPL, or command-line shell, allows you to interactively work within Puppet and see what effect each line of code you write will have. Rather than trying to understand an entire system at once, you can drop into the shell and try out a language construct or see how a variable will be interpolated. For even greater understanding, you can add breakpoints to your Puppet code so you can stop compilation at a known spot and inspect your variables or see what classes have been declared.Today's musical intro was recorded by Michelle on our SRE team and her band, Great Niece. Learn more• https://www.puppet-debugger.com• https://github.com/nwops/puppet-debugger• http://logicminds.github.io/categories/debugger *Ben Ford is a developer advocate at Puppet.*