Learn more about Puppet 4 and migrating from Puppet 3 from people who've built it and are using it at PuppetConf 2016 in San Diego. More details: https://puppet.com/puppetconf/

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Track Overview:
Puppet 4
19 - 21 October
San Diego

2. Enjoying the Journey From
Puppet 3.x to 4.x
Puppet 4 has been out for a year and a half and you still
have a Puppet 3 installation you need upgraded. We'll
examine the benefits of upgrading and lay out a plan to
make it happen. Many have been through the school of
hard knocks, and we'll use that knowledge to make our
own journey enjoyable. This session will cover both
Puppet FOSS and Enterprise editions.
2
Thursday, October 20 | 11:15 am
Puppet 4
System Administrator, ATT
Rob Nelson

3. The Truth, Nothing but the Truth:
Why Type Systems are Important
to Configuration Management
Automating the production of computer system configurations is
inherently complex, but can be made easier by creating reusable and
composable components using Puppet. Correctness is important. The
earlier we know if our server park will be turned into a field of smashed
pumpkins or be what we intended, the faster and more reliably we can
make changes. This talk introduces the concept of a type system - how
do humans think - why do we call a spade a spade? Touch on the
characteristics of untyped languages, duck typing, strict types, and type
inference. Discuss how types can make for better CM code and how
operations can learn from CS. This talk will be sprinkled with equal
doses of philosophy, AI, CM, CS and examples in Puppet.
3
Thursday, October 20 | 1:30 pm
Henrik Lindberg
Consulting Engineer, Puppet
Puppet 4

4. External Data in Puppet 4
This session will look at the new Puppet 4 lookup system
and compare with Hiera that came before. We will look at
the following:
● Basic overview of the lookup system
● Various merge modes
● Automatic Parameter Lookup
● Data in modules
● The lookup CLI
● lookup_options data item
4
Thursday, October 20 | 2:30 pm
R.I. Pienaar
Principal Software Engineer, Puppet
Puppet 4

5. Puppet Best Practices: Roles &
Profiles
Learn about roles and profiles with Puppet professional services
engineer Gary Larizza.
5
Thursday, October 20 | 3:45 pm
Gary Larizza
Professional Services Engineer, Puppet
Puppet 4

6. Closing the Loop: Direct Change
Control with Puppet
Configuration management can be roughly divided into two basic
problems: change what needs to change, keep the rest the same.
Puppet provides a single way to talk about both of those problems and
so we often treat them as a single concern. Typical change workflows
make change as part of regularly scheduled remediation runs, making
it difficult to know if and where a change has happened. In this
session, we'll learn how to use Puppet Enterprise change orchestration
to take direct control over when and how change happens. At the
same time, we'll discuss how being intentional about change can
make us more confident about what should stay the same.
6
Thursday, October 20 | 4:45 pm
Nick Lewis
Software Engineer, Puppet
Puppet 4

7. Puppet Design Patterns: Lessons
From the Gang of Four
The Design Patterns book is more than just a collection of elegant
solutions to common problems, it provides us with a vocabulary and
framework for analyzing those problems. Discussing and applying
design patterns helps shift the focus from the immediate problem to
design. As the Puppet community converged on an idea of what "good"
code looks like, Puppet design patterns began to emerge and design
became more important. With more and more complex software being
modeled in Puppet, those design patterns are more relevant than ever
before. As the Puppet language takes on more general purpose and
orchestration features, the need for good design patterns only grows
with every release. This talk will discuss some of those design patterns
and the problems that they solve.
7
Friday, October 21 | 11:15 am
David Danzilio
Cloud or Infrastructure Architect, Kovarus
Puppet 4

8. Getting to the Latest Puppet
Ready to upgrade? This session will cover the recommended
methods to get you to the latest version. We'll show you the git
workflow our Professional Services Engineers use to get your code
ready for Puppet 4. Using the puppet preview tool, we'll show you
how to generate a report, update your code based on the output,
and promote that code to production.
8
Thursday, October 20 | 1:30 pm
Elizabeth Wittig Plumb
Nate McCurdy
Professional Services Engineer, Puppet
Technical Account Manager, Puppet
Puppet 4

9. How to Succeed in Relearning
Puppet Without Really Trying
The UW - Madison Libraries recently began the process of
rearchitecting its Linux infrastructure. This has included updating
Puppet from an early version of Puppet 3 to Puppet 4 and taking a look
at the entire toolchain that we use to support our configuration
management and the general administration of our hosts. We've
learned a few things and want to share out our experience. This talk will
take a look at:
● How we went about identifying anti-patterns in our Puppet code
and infrastructure.
● How and why we went about relearning Puppet instead of
learning what had changed since we had last had time to
seriously work on it.
● What processes and tools we started looking at, such as testing,
secret management and code deployment.
9
Friday, October 21 | 2:30 pm
Joshua Zimmerman
System Administrator, University of
Wisconsin
Puppet 4

10. Puppet 4.x: The Low WAT-tage
Edition
Puppet 4 added a lot of new features, but it was also a banner release
for deleting horrible stuff! And all sysadmins are connoisseurs of
horrible stuff. In this talk, I'll revisit some of Puppet's buggiest
language mis-features, point out which Puppet 4 improvements killed
them, and show you how the revised Puppet language makes your
work simpler and more predictable.
1
0
Friday, October 21 | 3:45 pm
Nick Fagerlund
Technical Writer, Puppet
Puppet 4

11. Want to explore more PuppetConf
sessions?
View our full agenda and other tracks at
puppet.com/puppetconf

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Puppet 4:
Speakers
19 - 21 October
San Diego

13. Rob Nelson
System Administrator, ATT
Rob Nelson is an IT professional with almost 20 years of
experience in the industry, mostly in Security and Operations.
When he's not fixing or breaking stuff, you can find him on
twitter @rnelson0 or at his blog, rnelson0.com.

14. Henrik Lindberg
Consulting Engineer, Puppet
Henrik has 30 years of experience architecting and
developing software. Past positions include CTO of
Cloudsmith Inc, leadership of BEA’s Java Run-Time Group
(JRockit) and CTO and/or technical founder of several
publicly and privately held software companies. Henrik works
on the Language team at Puppet and is the author of the 4.x
"future" parser, and Puppet Type System.

15. R.I. Pienaar
Systems Architect
Europe based consultant specialising in automation and
systems administration. Puppet user since 0.22, author of
MCollective, extlookup, Hiera, facts.d and more

16. Gary Larizza
Professional Services Engineer, Puppet
Gary has been a Professional Services Engineer with Puppet
since 2011 (when our logo was a flask and Luke's shoes
were blue). When he's not trying to human-parse JSON, his
interests include travel, house music that doesn't sound like
Transformer intercourse, and not having to explain the
anchor pattern.

17. Nick Lewis
Software Engineer, Puppet
Nick Lewis has been an engineer at Puppet for six years,
working on myriad projects in that time. He was one of the
authors of PuppetDB and most recently has worked on
Puppet application orchestration. Nick also helps run
Puppet's HipChat bot Kerminator.

18. David Danzilio
Cloud or Infrastructure Architect, Kovarus
David is an architect at Kovarus and lives in Boston, MA.
He's been using Puppet since 2009, well before it was the
cool thing to do. He has a background in operations for
government, higher education, research, healthcare, and
SaaS organizations. David has consulted on several Puppet
implementations of varying size and complexity and has
worked with numerous teams on integrating Puppet into their
workflow. David is passionate about open source and
contributes to a number of projects. David is one of the
maintainers of the Vox Pupuli project (voxpupuli.org), an
effort to bring together Puppet developers and users to
collectively maintain popular modules and plugins. He holds
an MBA in management information systems as well as a BA
in political science.

19. Nate McCurdy
Nate McCurdy, Puppet
Nate McCurdy is a professional services engineer at Puppet.
A consultant since grade school, Nate's been helping
sysadmins and non-sysadmins alike (hi mom!) figure out
those pesky computering bleep-blop machines. With
experience maintaining everything from simple desktops and
servers to regional NOC's to massive Puppet installations,
Nate brings a wide variety of skill sets to help answer the
question of: "How do I do less work and get more done?"
When Nate's not automating your issues away, showing off
his zsh prompt, or running cat6 through his house again,
you'll find him relaxing to a nice sour lambic somewhere in
Portland... actually, wait no, no, yeah not relaxing, it's
catching a flight again.... that's the one.

20. Elizabeth Wittig
Plumb
Technical Account Manager, Puppet
Elizabeth Plumb started working at Puppet in January 2014.
She was a technical solutions engineer, helping new users
understand what Puppet Enterprise is and how to use it,
before moving into her current position as a technical
account manager. Her focus is working with larger
customers, understanding how they use Puppet Enterprise,
helping them be successful with the tool, and advocating for
her customers internally at Puppet.

21. Joshua Zimmerman
System Administrator, University of Wisconsin
Joshua has worked for the University of Wisconsin - Madison
Libraries for the past decade, playing a variety of roles
ranging from helpdesk support, web developer, and
Windows systems administration. For the past four years,
Joshua has been part of a team of administrators
architecting and maintaining an ever-growing Linux server
environment for applications both developed in house and
procured from vendors. In his spare time, Joshua
co-organizes the Madison DevOps meetup.

22. Nick Fagerlund
Technical Writer, Puppet
Nick Fagerlund has been writing for docs.puppet.com for
about five years, and likes doing experiments on software. A
few years ago he tried to make the worst repository of
Puppet code anyone had ever seen, then gave a talk about it
at PuppetConf.

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Get on the path
to a better future
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