This demo-heavy session led by Puppet Certified Consultant Tim Odom and Tim Carr will focus on common integration patterns for operationalizing Puppet in IaaS deployments. In this session we’ll focus on how to integrate Puppet into IaaS orchestration platforms built from tools like ServiceNow, AWS CloudFormation Templates, Cisco UCS-D, and VMware vRealize Automation. We’ll demonstrate both on-prem and public cloud use cases and address how these integrations differ. Deploying, however, is only a very small part of an object's lifecycle. In the second part of our session we’ll address how we provide feedback of application state change to ServiceNow’s change management system and how that can be leveraged to escalate incident resolution and also automate parts of your compliance workflows. Finally, we’ll show how feedback loops can be leveraged to intelligently scale resources with approval patterns.

2. Deploying is Only Half the Battle:
Operationalizing Application Stacks
with Puppet
Tim Odom, Tim Carr
Cloud Services - AHEAD

3. So much material so little Tim… er. time
1. Toolsets and patterns needed for IaaS Deployments.
2. Relating the pattern to a real world use case. (VMware vRA/vRO)
3. Orchestration.
4. Using orchestration for operations! (ServiceNow and Puppet)

4. Toolsets and Patterns
…seen in IaaS deployments

5. Automating IaaS Deployments
Which tool? Where should I use it?
Cloud/Lifecycle
Management
Orchestration
Configuration
Management

6. Orchestrations
…or, stuff we do every day.

7. Axiom of Orchestration
All Orchestrations Require:
● Key Performance Indicator
● Threshold
● A system for monitoring the KPI and how it relates to the threshold
● An orchestration to trigger when the threshold is reached.
Orchestration is human nature.

8. Axiom of Orchestration – Test it.
● Key Performance Indicator – Can I see?
● Threshold – How bad does it have to be before I really can’t see.
● A system for monitoring the KPI and how it relates to the threshold – My eyes.
● An orchestration to trigger when the threshold is reached. – Me walking to the light
switch and turning it on.
Last night, I walked into my hotel room at 8pm. It was dark. I turned on the light.

9. Orchestration Appears to be Fractal
● It was dark, so I turned on the light.
● I was hungry, so I grabbed dinner.
● My disk filled up, so I was paged to add space.
● My disk filled up, so I orchestrated adding space.
● My disk was close to filling up, so I orchestrated adding space and automated alerting
storage/capacity management team.
Same pattern everywhere at all levels, different implementations.

10. Real World Example
…with code and stuff.

11. Current State:
● DevOps and engineering blended team.
● No "non-puppet“ configuration changes.
● Any "non-puppet" configuration drift should raise an incident.
…or better known as “we’ve always done it this way”. n

12. The current solution:
● The same small group of engineers.
● Monitoring consists an open browser pointed at the Puppet Console with Events
Summary page displayed.
● If a failure or corrective change is noticed, send an email to team mates alerting them to
the potential chicanery, investigate and possibly remediate the issue.
● Enter a manual incident in ServiceNow.
Monitoring and remediation.

13. Problems with this approach?
We are good aren’t we? After all, we have:
• KPI
• Threshold
• Tool
• Orchestrator
• Manual process sprawl is fractal as well.

14. We can do better
• They are still missing most corrective changes.
• How do we glue it all together?
Report processing to the rescue!
A little dab’ll do ya

15. Puppet Custom Report Processors
• Following the application of a catalog, the puppet
agent generates and sends a report to a master.
• If you enable multiple report processors, Puppet
runs all of them for each report.
• Extends Puppet reporting capabilities via ruby
plugins.
Extending the puppet report processing api

16. Code review/ demo
The underlying config.
● Ruby code
– /lib/reports/puppet
● Config file
– ${confdir}/report2snow.yaml
● Puppet code
– Not necessary but makes config
easier
Our environment
● Master
– Config file
– Report2snow.log
– console
● Node
– Standard run
– Corrective change
Let’s show it off!