Continuous Delivery for Infrastructure

Puppet have recently announced the general availability of Continuous Delivery for Puppet Enterprise. Puppet believe this is a simpler way to test, promote and deploy Puppet code across environments. This is important because it is defining your infrastructure as code and giving you more transparency and control on the overall delivery cycle of your infrastructure. In this post I am only focusing on the Puppet offering and not looking at the wider market. To use Continuous Delivery for Puppet Enterprise you must be a Puppet Enterprise customer. I will cover the overall benefits of CD for Infrastructure in a separate blog.

What is Continuous Delivery for Puppet Enterprise?

Continuous Delivery (CD for PE) is an add on service for existing Puppet Enterprise customers. Puppet believe that continuous delivery isn’t just for application developers or release management teams. The more your teams can standardize and scale the delivery of infrastructure and applications using a common set of practices throughout the organization, the faster teams can deploy and generate more business value.

With Continuous Delivery for Puppet Enterprise you can:

• Visually build continuous delivery pipelines for your infrastructure code in minutes with an intuitive web UI and automatically promote infrastructure code across environments based on your desired approval workflows and criteria.
• Automate the way you test and promote changes to control repos and modules, so you can deliver infrastructure changes faster and with more confidence.
• Get full visibility into changes with activity histories and audit trails to align teams and managers on every deploy, and to help triage things quickly when the unexpected happens.
• Stagger deployments and execute rolling updates across your infrastructure, reducing risk when deploying changes across hundreds to thousands of devices.

How to get started

Puppet have made it easy for you to get started with Continuous Delivery for Puppet Enterprise. Here are the three simple steps...

1. Install Continuous Delivery for Puppet Enterprise

Installing Continuous Delivery for PE requires you to pull and run a Docker container, then follow our guided setup to create the root account and configure your installation. Once you do that, you’ll simply connect your source control system and Puppet Enterprise instance, and you’ll be ready to go. Learn more here.

2. Test your Puppet code

Jobs are fully customizable tests for your Puppet code. You can create a job that runs any sort of test you wish, from module validation to linting. Once you set up a pipeline for a given branch of your module's control repo, every time you commit code to that branch, the jobs you've added to the pipeline will run automatically.

Read more about how to implement testing workflows for your Puppet code and see example test jobs here.

3. Deploy your Puppet code

Deployment policies are prescriptive workflows for Puppet code deployment that are built into Continuous Delivery for Puppet Enterprise. You select the best deployment policy for your situation, and Continuous Delivery for PE does all the Git heavy lifting for you, so your code is quickly and easily deployed to the right nodes.

Who is CD for PE perfect for?

CD for PE has a number of use cases - below I have summarized what the main use cases and problems are that it may help for my customers.

• Growing Puppet Enterprise managed infrastructure organically, e.g, addition of cloud platforms, or via acquisition - If you have a growing estate that encompasses both On Prem and Cloud - CD for PE will be a single source of truth.
• Expanding PE to new teams/parts of their fleet, e.g., Linux → Windows - CD for PE will unify across both Windows and Linux.
• “I’ve built my own CI/CD setup for Puppet code to take care of this, but I’m the only one that understands it.” Something I hear a lot - This will give you an Enterprise supported offering that will be very easy to pick up and deploy.
• “I don’t have a repeatable and safe way to incrementally update my entire infrastructure when I’ve checked in new Puppet code. I don’t want to run Puppet on all nodes at once, but I do want to know if there are any problems as a result of my new code.” - Probably the most common challenge I hear - Puppet will give you cadence on your delivery process across all stages of the cycle.

If you want to find out more about CD for PE - please drop me a direct mail - happy to run through a demo with you.