When it comes to configuration management and applications people try to adopt the config management also to application rollout or upgrades. Usually, people will struggle hard to get the things done right – especially when it comes to server or service dependencies. In my talk I am going to show how one can integrate Puppet declarative configuration management with Task based Workflows and Plan based Orchestration using Puppet Bolt. Many people might already know Puppet. I am giving an overview on Puppet limitations and how Puppet Bolt helps you to add the missing parts of Puppet. I am going to explain the differences between workflows and the according tasks and orchestration and the plans- You will receive an overview on the integration between Puppet and Puppet Bolt and how to develop and use Bolt Tasks and Plans.

1. CfgMgmt vs Work
fl
ows
vs Orchestration
stackconf 2022
Martin Alfke
ma@betadots.de
© betadots GmbH 2022

2. Martin Alfke
CEO betadots
© betadots GmbH 2022
• Linux since 1996, Puppet since 2009
• Puppet Trainer since 2011
• Puppet Certi
fi
ed Solution Consultant since 2015
• tuxmea (Twitter, GitHub, Slack)
• DevOps/SRE Consulting, Training and Development
About
CfgMgmt vs. Work
fl
ows vs. Orchestration - stackconf 2022

3. Agenda
© betadots GmbH 2022
• Con
fi
guration Management
• Work
fl
ows
• Orchestration
• Summary
Agenda
CfgMgmt vs. Work
fl
ows vs. Orchestration - stackconf 2022

4. © betadots GmbH 2022
CfgMgmt vs. Work
fl
ows vs. Orchestration - stackconf 2022
Con
fi
guration
Management

5. © betadots GmbH 2022
CfgMgmt vs. Work
fl
ows vs. Orchestration - stackconf 2022
Con
fi
guration Management
The past
In the past maintaining platforms has been a nightmare:
- Unplanned changes
- Outages
- New setups for new products
- Unreproducible changes
- Incomplete changes

6. © betadots GmbH 2022
CfgMgmt vs. Work
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ows vs. Orchestration - stackconf 2022
Con
fi
guration Management
The past
Raise your hands if you remember or have seen that:
- everybody had its own set of scripts for automation
- changes could not be done because of hardware
maintenance
- one accidentally omitted a new server from deployment
- a deployment must be done during night

7. © betadots GmbH 2022
CfgMgmt vs. Work
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ows vs. Orchestration - stackconf 2022
Con
fi
guration Management
The modern past
More than 10 years ago, the modern Con
fi
guration
Management showed up.
Bcfg2 and cfengine used a client server model and
implemented the desired changes.
Puppet introduced the declarative state con
fi
guration and
moved the change process into Version Control.
Ansible moved from client/server to an SSH-based push
implementation.

8. © betadots GmbH 2022
CfgMgmt vs. Work
fl
ows vs. Orchestration - stackconf 2022
Con
fi
guration Management
The present
All tools use the principle of Infrastructure as Code.
Code must be developed in Version Control and tested.
Some people name this DevOps, some name it SRE.
DevOps: Developer build and run their applications
SRE: provides an infrastructure for DevOps automation

9. © betadots GmbH 2022
CfgMgmt vs. Work
fl
ows vs. Orchestration - stackconf 2022
Con
fi
guration Management
The problem
Within Declarative State Con
fi
guration (DSC) we describe the
fi
nal desired state of a system.
But:
- how to deal with DSC if you need to stop and later restart a
service?
- how to deal with actions which must not run permanently
but on demand only?

10. © betadots GmbH 2022
CfgMgmt vs. Work
fl
ows vs. Orchestration - stackconf 2022
Work
fl
ow
Management

11. © betadots GmbH 2022
CfgMgmt vs. Work
fl
ows vs. Orchestration - stackconf 2022
Work
fl
ow Management
What is a work
fl
ow?
Anything which is not describable in its
fi
nal state but usually
done via a script or command should be considered a work
fl
ow.

12. © betadots GmbH 2022
CfgMgmt vs. Work
fl
ows vs. Orchestration - stackconf 2022
Work
fl
ow Management
Why does a work
fl
ow con
fl
ict with DSC?
Declarative State Con
fi
guration (DSC) describes the desired
fi
nal setup of a system.
Any declarative state management solution compares the
existing with the desired state.
DSC does not allow con
fl
icting changes (service stop, do
something, service start).

13. © betadots GmbH 2022
CfgMgmt vs. Work
fl
ows vs. Orchestration - stackconf 2022
Work
fl
ow Management
Work
fl
ow implementations
Ansible users place the commands in playbooks and run them
on-demand.
This is possible due to Ansible push model.
Puppet runs in pull mode. Therefore we need another solution:
Puppet Bolt Tasks
Puppet users develop tasks which consist of a Script (Bash,
Python, Ruby, Perl, PowerShell) and a JSON
fi
le which
describes the parameters and the desired Data Types.

14. © betadots GmbH 2022
CfgMgmt vs. Work
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ows vs. Orchestration - stackconf 2022
Work
fl
ow Management
Work
fl
ow implementations - Puppet
Tasks

15. © betadots GmbH 2022
CfgMgmt vs. Work
fl
ows vs. Orchestration - stackconf 2022
Work
fl
ow Management
Work
fl
ow implementations - Puppet
Tasks

16. © betadots GmbH 2022
CfgMgmt vs. Work
fl
ows vs. Orchestration - stackconf 2022
Work
fl
ow Management
Work
fl
ow implementations - Puppet
Tasks

17. © betadots GmbH 2022
CfgMgmt vs. Work
fl
ows vs. Orchestration - stackconf 2022
Work
fl
ow Management
Work
fl
ow implementations with SSH
Ansible users run playbooks.
Puppet users can make use of Puppet Bolt
bolt task show
bolt task run <modulename>::upgrade_app -t <node> version=‘1.4.5’

18. © betadots GmbH 2022
CfgMgmt vs. Work
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ows vs. Orchestration - stackconf 2022
Work
fl
ow Management
Work
fl
ow implementations without SSH
Ansible users can make use of Tower or AWX.
Puppet users can make use of Puppet Enterprise or Choria.
Not using SSH, but a Message Queue

19. © betadots GmbH 2022
CfgMgmt vs. Work
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ows vs. Orchestration - stackconf 2022
Work
fl
ow Management
Work
fl
ow examples
Anything you do not regular or which is an anti-pattern to DSC
is a work
fl
ow:
- we need an anonymised backup from production database
for the dev environment
- during application update we must refresh the application
caches while the application is stopped.
- we need the actual con
fi
guration as CSV
fi
le

20. © betadots GmbH 2022
CfgMgmt vs. Work
fl
ows vs. Orchestration - stackconf 2022
Work
fl
ow Management
But
- how do we deal with application dependencies?
- how can we ensure that an application stack is built in order
(DB, Middleware, Frontend)

21. © betadots GmbH 2022
CfgMgmt vs. Work
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ows vs. Orchestration - stackconf 2022
Orchestration
Management

22. © betadots GmbH 2022
CfgMgmt vs. Work
fl
ows vs. Orchestration - stackconf 2022
Orchestration Management
What is orchestration?
Actions which must be done in order either on a single system
or platform wide needs an orchestration.
Consider spinning up a new environment. You need:
- VMs
- Base con
fi
guration
- Application deployment

23. © betadots GmbH 2022
CfgMgmt vs. Work
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ows vs. Orchestration - stackconf 2022
Orchestration Management
What is orchestration?
Actions which must be done in order either on a single system
or platform wide needs an orchestration.
Consider spinning up an application. You need to start the
application in strict order:
- Start Service A on Server A
- Start Service B on Server B
- Restart Service A on Server A

24. © betadots GmbH 2022
CfgMgmt vs. Work
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ows vs. Orchestration - stackconf 2022
Orchestration Management
Orchestration Implementation
Within Ansible one uses Hostgroups.
Within Puppet Bolt one can use Puppet Plans.
Puppet Plans are written in Puppet DSL or YAML and are
executed on an Orchestration Host.
The Plan describes which Puppet Tasks or commands must be
run on which Servers in which order.

25. © betadots GmbH 2022
CfgMgmt vs. Work
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ows vs. Orchestration - stackconf 2022
Orchestration Management
Orchestration Implementation -
Puppet Plans

26. © betadots GmbH 2022
CfgMgmt vs. Work
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ows vs. Orchestration - stackconf 2022
Orchestration Management
Orchestration Implementation -
Puppet Plans

27. © betadots GmbH 2022
CfgMgmt vs. Work
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ows vs. Orchestration - stackconf 2022
Orchestration Management
Orchestration Implementation -
Puppet Plans
Server lists can be fetched by a Plan from PuppetDB based on
Facter or Catalog information.

28. © betadots GmbH 2022
CfgMgmt vs. Work
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ows vs. Orchestration - stackconf 2022
Orchestration Management
Orchestration Implementation -
Puppet Plans

29. © betadots GmbH 2022
CfgMgmt vs. Work
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ows vs. Orchestration - stackconf 2022
Summary

30. © betadots GmbH 2022
CfgMgmt vs. Work
fl
ows vs. Orchestration - stackconf 2022
Summary
CfgMgmt + Work
fl
ows + Orchestration
CfgMgmt helps organisations
- to build scalable platforms
- which are easy to spin up from scratch (TTM)
- which are easy to recover (MTTR) and
- which is adoptable to new required setups.
CfgMgmt automation reduces time and effort

31. © betadots GmbH 2022
CfgMgmt vs. Work
fl
ows vs. Orchestration - stackconf 2022
Summary
CfgMgmt + Work
fl
ows + Orchestration
Work
fl
ows are needed
- to automate single tasks
- if we need to run actions on demand only
- if actions con
fl
ict with DSC

32. © betadots GmbH 2022
CfgMgmt vs. Work
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ows vs. Orchestration - stackconf 2022
Summary
CfgMgmt + Work
fl
ows + Orchestration
Orchestration is needed to get the whole picture of an
infrastructure.
Deploy three-tier applications in order.
Run patches amounts clusters without downtime (passive,
switch, 2nd node)

33. © betadots GmbH 2022
CfgMgmt vs. Work
fl
ows vs. Orchestration - stackconf 2022
Summary
CfgMgmt + Work
fl
ows + Orchestration
Existing Con
fi
guration Management Solutions implement all of
these.
Ansible has orchestration built-in due to the push model
Puppet needs Tasks and Plans

34. © betadots GmbH 2022
CfgMgmt vs. Work
fl
ows vs. Orchestration - stackconf 2022
Summary
CfgMgmt + Work
fl
ows + Orchestration
Containers still need these!
- CfgMgmt -> Docker
fi
le
- Work
fl
ows -> Compose/Helm
- Orchestration -> Kubernetes/Swarm

35. © betadots GmbH 2022
CfgMgmt vs Work
fl
ows
vs Orchestration
stackconf 2022
Thanks you!
ma@betadots.de