Puppetize PDX 2019

Over the past 6 years, the Puppet team at Walmart has on-boarded and enabled 77 Puppet developers from all areas of the organization. We knew from the start that our small team wouldn’t be able to do this on our own and needed to make it easy for others to learn and use Puppet. This investment has paid off as our first and second generation of Puppet developers have moved on to new teams to mentor other new Puppet developers. It has also enabled our core Puppet team to remain small and agile. In this talk, I’ll share:

● The process for onboarding new developers. How do you evaluate the current level of contributors and when do you know they’re ready for more?
● Guardrails for ensuring developers could change Puppet code safely and without fear or taking down the whole system.
● How to build spaces for learning through pair programming and hands-on learning through applying Puppet to a specific set of problems.

What can you learn about DevOps and software delivery practices by looking at data from a platform with more than 300,000 developers, 25,000 organizations and 25+ million builds per month? I wanted to find out. As an author of State of DevOps Report in 2018, I was very interested in this new data set from a large SaaS developer platform. What items pop out from the data? Are they different than what is seen through surveys where responders opt-in to participating vs. being aggregated through platform usage? Additionally, does the data validate assertions from State of DevOps Reports of years past about batch sizes, trunk development, and team size?

I’ll cover a view into anonymized team data to share insights, behaviors, and metrics that help teams build better software, faster from millions of builds, and look into characteristics of success that we can measure through our data. Then I’ll overlay that onto what we’ve found through survey data and point out confirmed actions that improve delivery flow, and open up some counter points to what we’ve seen so far.

This session will walk through the mysterious task of getting Beaker running in PDK and present a multi-node acceptance test using the puppetlabs-ntp module.

The presentation hopes to promote an understanding of the following:
* Why acceptance testing is important
* Why multi-node acceptance tests are important
* A minimal-fuss method for getting Beaker running via rake tasks and PDK

Bolt + Splunk can bring the power of Investigation, Triage, and Collaboration with the ability to make data-driven decisions to deliver real-time insights into your environment. These details can help you build a better understanding of your whole situation by taking an agentless approach in operations, security, and development. We are going to show you a few examples of this and how you can fix things on demand or by utilizing alert actions to remediate issues quickly.

Testing at scale is hard, but at Walmart, we have accepted this challenge and done what we can to minimize the risk of change. In this talk, I’ll be sharing our testing workflow, how our testing has evolved, things we’ve had to do to make PDK and other tools work in our environment, and some things we learned along the way.

Running software in containers is a growing trend in software delivery. Puppet recognizes the impact of this approach and is actively building a container native version of Puppet Enterprise. Join “Pupperware” team members Morgan Rhodes and Ethan Brown to learn how Puppet Enterprise containers are constructed and the operational differences that this model brings. Look forward to hearing about: separation of configuration and data from application, the philosophy behind installation / upgrades, and how this approach may be more consistent with organization-wide application management policy. Discover how these containers are already improving Puppet’s internal testing and how these same concepts can be applied universally. Finally, get a peek at future improvement and support plans, including being able to run a Puppet master on Windows!

In this talk, Cat and Carl will discuss the challenges IT organizations face when accelerating their velocity and coordinating across teams, all while trying to keep the lights on. You will learn how Continuous Delivery for Puppet Enterprise helps to address these challenges, and get a glimpse of upcoming features in our infrastructure continuous delivery solution.

The latest release of Puppet Enterprise is coming out in a month! This talk will cover all of the new features added in PE that have been enabled by bolt technology. It will cover tasks, agentless, and plans, in addition to expanded use cases Puppet Enterprise covers with examples of customer usage.

When onboarding staff, how long does it take organisations to realise someone who is effective at their job once all onboarding is done? At Transurban this is a day zero activity for us, chat ops has given us a way to use our toolset by just using English. We will cover what we've done with Puppet, Webex, ServiceNow and Chatops to effectively lower the barrier to learning new skills and complete simple tasks across the business.

Ever wished you could just start coding instead of having to always read and learn first? The Puppet Debugger was designed specifically for this type of exploration and helps you learn and debug the puppet language like never before. Solve complex problems instantaneously by breaking into your code. Yes-- I am talking about shattering the windows of the compiler’s house so you steal the inner secrets of how functions, interpolations, blocks, and resources work. There is no other tool that gives you this kind of view and instant feedback.

In this talk, I’ll cover how to get started, basic debugger commands, how to use with Hiera lookup calls, and how to break into your code. I’ll even throw in a map reduce pattern inside a function for you.

But wait! That’s not all! Every attendee will also get a sneak peek at the new upcoming PDK console command.

Once upon a time, there was a mystical land whose inhabitants were able to manage patching on their Linux AND Windows servers using a single tool.

Join me for a jaunt into this fantastical land where you'll hear tales of collaboration, compliance and self service automation!