The main piece of tech that I maintain myself is this blog, so I usually find time to play with it, try new technology such as Docker. Unsurprisingly, this has led it to be a little over-engineered, and I wanted something simpler. Why was I trying to figure out how to configure a database in a container for a blog that only I was maintaining? I didn’t need CMS-like functionality, if anything I needed a static site. ...
Today is a very big day for me. Today is my last day at Puppet. Puppet has been a huge part of my life for almost 7 years. It all started way back in 2011, when I was working at Simply Business. We’d just done a big shift to continuous deployment. We had a fully working deployment pipeline, but our ops workflows were starting to creak a bit at the seams. We started a new project to start managing the sytems with Puppet in an agentless model, and I was hooked. ...
So, I looked at my blog and realised I didn’t blog at all in 2017. Honestly, it was a pretty evenful year for me, so I think I have a good excuse: I switched roles at Puppet, changing from Pro Service Engineer to Techinical Account Manager I got married I went on a two week honeymoon And right at the end of the year, I had a baby I did a lot of travel, not quite as much as 2016, but a lot: ...
Well, here it is, Day 30 of the #vdm30in30. Here’s some stats on the last 30 days of posts: 23,343 Words 213,374 Characters 238 Sentences 29 Paragraphs 1 hr 25 mins Reading Time 2 hrs 10 mins Speaking Time Most used words: puppet 264 (4%) provider 116 (2%) puppetlabs 93 (1%) package 90 (1%) should 87 (1%) code 85 (1%) cockpit 85 (1%) opt 84 (1%) executed 80 (1%) run 79 (1%) Not sure how accurate that is because there’s a lot of code snippets in there, but seems about right: Each post was roughly about 750 words or so. ...
Day 29 in the #vDM30in30 Image from https://flic.kr/p/sqiJKP Let’s talk about the lifecycle of a Puppet run. The Puppet agent process collects information about the host it is running on including facts, which it passes to the server. The parser uses that system information and Puppet modules on local disk to compile a configuration for that particular host and returns it to the agent. The agent applies that configuration locally, thus affecting the local state of the host, and files the resulting report with the server, including the facts from the system Essentially, Puppet runs in an atomic fashion: Information it has is locked at the start of the run, and is not changed. At the end of the run, facts might be different, but the catalog stays the same. ...