Counting Resource Translation Misses
Posted on February 20, 2018
| 6 minutes
| 1113 words
| Felix Frank
This is another post in the wake of CfgMgmtCamp 2018, where the mgmt hack room saw lively discussion that inspired some new ideas as well as reminding me of some ideas I had last year, but didn’t manage to implement or describe yet. This post is about one of those.
Recap Even though we now have a slick Puppet module that allows early adopters and testers to run mgmt from Puppet manifest code, our ability to run existing, complex manifests is somewhat limited.
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Thinking About Migration From Puppet To Mgmt
Posted on February 13, 2018
| 10 minutes
| 1930 words
| Felix Frank
Abstract We have already implemented a way to replace the Puppet Agent with the mgmt engine. It can run a graph on a machine that is derived from the machine’s Puppet catalog. The user is limited to mgmt features that can be expressed in Puppet’s DSL in this scenario. In order to unlock mgmt’s full potential, the user will have to rewrite all their Puppet code in mgmt’s language.
This presents a significant challenge for maintainers of larger Puppet code bases that are actively used and evolving.
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Guest Post By John Arundel
Posted on June 25, 2017
| 1 minutes
| 102 words
| Felix Frank
When a prominent fellow tech author like John Arundel offers you to review your title, and even do it in the form of a guest post on your blog, you will probably find yourself facing the proverbial no-brainer decision. Or perhaps that’s just me. (If it is, you all should probably stop pondering so much about everyting, though.)
This review is so beautifully written, it warms my heart and fills me with pride (seasoned with a hint of imposter syndrome).
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The Most Important Resource
Posted on November 19, 2016
| 6 minutes
| 1166 words
| Felix Frank
Note: This article was written in early October 2016, then sat in my local git clone for almost two months, waiting for final review. This happened because of an intense conference season and some other distracting circumstance. So, it is with great relief and satisfaction that I can finally throw this at you now :-) Enjoy, and thanks for reading!
Current status: Itching to write some Go. Now what? Adding tests to mgmt is a good exercise, and I will be doing a lot more of it in the months to come.
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Translating All The Things
Posted on August 19, 2016
| 8 minutes
| 1495 words
| Felix Frank
Through the last months, I’ve written a lot about my work on the translator module for Puppet, which allows us to control mgmt with manifest code.
One gimmick we had imagined early was the ability to support arbitrary manifests in mgmt, by invoking puppet resource for vertices that mgmt itself cannot handle. This works now, in principle, and it nicely demonstrates the amount of work that still needs doing.
Shaving the yak Adding the generic pseudo-translator code to the module was relatively straight-forward.
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Edging It All In
Posted on July 12, 2016
| 10 minutes
| 2104 words
| Felix Frank
The mgmt translator for puppet catalogs was truly created from the bottom up. We started with a few resource types, and the relationships between the translated resources. This falls short for many catalogs, of course, because dependencies must often put whole classes in order, or do the same for instances of defined types.
Allowing the translator module to accept such macro-dependencies was not much work, but it did require some intense digging.
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Puppet Powered Mgmt
Posted on June 19, 2016
| 5 minutes
| 855 words
| Felix Frank
Recently, I wrote a veritable deep-dive on mgmt’s new Puppet integration code, but didn’t include a good overview of how the new features look in practice. Here we go.
The original interface If you recall, mgmt has no configuration language of its own. With its highly dynamic and distributed nature, it’s also not a good fit for the languages that established tools such as puppet and chef use. (Please note that Salt has no language either, and Ansible relies on a weird YAML hybrid).
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Puppet, Meet Mgmt
Posted on June 12, 2016
| 26 minutes
| 5493 words
| Felix Frank
Welcome back I just realized that it has been almost 4 months since my last post. If you missed it, you should probably read it before this one. I kicked off quite a bit of work then and much has come to fruition in the meantime. This is my report.
Update: This post is quite extensive and covers the guts of the implementation. For a succinct overview of the new functionality, see the follow-up.
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From Catalog To Mgmt
Posted on February 18, 2016
| 16 minutes
| 3300 words
| Felix Frank
Have you heard of mgmt yet? It’s (currently) a prototype config management engine written by James and brings some exciting new ideas to the table, building on the proven concepts of Puppet. You should probably read up on it right now.
James gave the inaugural demo at ConfigMgmtCamp 2016 in Gent, Belgium, and mentioned that he can picture a sort of “transpiler” that will create resource graphs from Puppet manifest code.
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Using Http Files
Posted on February 6, 2016
| 4 minutes
| 768 words
| Felix Frank
Overview In the introductory post about the new support for source => "http://..." parameters in Puppet’s file resource type, I promised a follow-up that would explain the technical details of the implementation. This is not that post.
Instead, seeing as Puppet 4.4 will hopefully be released soon and make this feature available to you, I will explain the caveats in greater detail first and add some perspective on how to best circumvent them.
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