[colug-432] puppet: leveraging another module

[Matthew Hyclak]

In my opinion, you're not far off Scott. PuppetLabs and Red Hat are a
little bit at odds with one another philosophically and it shows.

Satellite 6.0's puppet integration leaves some things to be desired in the
module/environment management space. The puppet environment is
automatically generated as part of a (constantly name-changing) Content
View, which can also contain RPM content as well. For simpler cases, or
where people want to point and click, it's not so bad. Properly written
modules can take advantage of Foreman's Smart Class Parameters and matching
rules to get data into the modules. Except those parameters are not
auditable or (easily) versionable.

Satellite 6.1 is supposed to help in this area somewhat - the Content View
environment and Puppet environment are going to be decoupled, so you can
have a Content View of "MyCompany_RHEL_7_Production" and a Puppet
environment of "development" for example.

Red Hat is aware of the management issues of Smart Class Parameters and are
working to make those better, but I don't think that will be until at least
6.2. 6.1 is currently in a private beta and I expect a public beta any day
now.

Going the git/hiera/r10k route is the workflow direction Puppetlabs seems
to be pushing for. You can shoehorn hiera into Satellite, but it's not
pretty and the ability to keep separate git branches for your puppet
environments goes away.

If you're attending Red Hat Summit this year, there is a presentation on
Thursday at 4:50 called Puppet Enterprise & Red Hat Satellite 6 which is
joint between Red Hat and Puppetlabs. If you won't be at Summit, I'm sure
you can find a video of it after Summit is over.

For what we've been doing, I've advocated for keeping the Puppet master
separate from Satellite. I'm still using Satellite as the ENC to assign
classes (acting as the role part of roles/profiles) by assigning a single
profile class to each server. When 6.1 hits, this will make more sense as
right now I end up having to create puppet environments called things like
KT_Company_Production_RHEL_7 as branches in my r10k control repo.

Hope that helps!

Matt

On Fri, Jun 12, 2015 at 1:11 PM, Scott Merrill <skippy at skippy.net> wrote:

> The Puppet in Satellite 6 will be locked in at an older version, and will
> be very slow to upgrade. I think you're likely to miss out on a lot of the
> developing features of Puppet if you use Sat6.
>
> I see Sat6's Puppet+Foreman as cobbler before them: a good jump start for
> big, slow moving enterprises that will benefit from some level of
> automation, but not something super useful for more nimble customers who
> can tackle automation and config management on their own.
>
> But maybe I'm wrong.
>
> On Jun 12, 2015 12:06 PM, Rick Hornsby <richardjhornsby at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > > On Jun 12, 2015, at 09:41, Matthew Hyclak <hyclak at gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > Count me in for a meetup.
> > >
> > > We're doing some things with Satellite 6 and Puppet/hiera/r10k that
> may be interesting. I've been spending some time rewriting modules into the
> roles/profiles pattern as well.
> >
> > While I'm geographically unable to attend a meetup, I'm interested to
> hear your progress/experience/thoughts on using Satellite 6's built-in
> puppet master capabilities.  I'm presently learning/architecting/developing
> Puppet on a stand-alone Puppet server, but I've been asked to look at using
> our coming Satellite 6 server as the more permanent puppet master.  So much
> of Satellite comes pre-configured (Foreman, etc) that I'm a bit leery of
> making configuration changes under the hood to support hiera (instead of
> the default of letting Foreman handle the class assignments for example).
> >
> >
> > -rick
> >
> >
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