30 Posts in 30 Days

Robert is again doing a blog series where he writes 30 posts in 30 days. I’m also participating (as last year) and will try to write one post each day, from the 2nd of November until the 2nd of december.

Let us start this 30 posts challenge with a special word of praise to Robert.

I first met him in #r10k, I came there to learn about solutions for creating Puppet test environments somehow dynamically. Robert heavily contributed to the r10k documentation and is always present there to answer even the stupiest questions. These questions where almost always mine, without his and finchs help (the r10k author) I would probably still try to figure out how r10k works and how I implement it in my employers infrastructure. After setting all this up I had a great utility to create dynamic environments on all of our puppet masters, but now I had a new issue: How do I structure my puppet code to make it easily distributable in any puppet environment and how do I manage which node gets which code. Robert is blogging heavily and also wrote about the solution for my issue, the roles and profiles design pattern.

I’m trying to give support on the #puppet IRC channel, many people have the same problems as I had, I stopped describing the solution a long time ago and only refer to his blog post (series) which really covers all issues that you can find while designing your puppet infrastructure.

He even improved the complete workflow that comes with the Roles/Profiles pattern, wrote a very detailed article about it, didn’t forget hiera and even created a bootstrap puppet file and rspec tests for this.

I’m writing this blog series in english to honor his work, he is always reachable via IRC and open for any question, he usually has a good muppet show clip up his sleeve and regularly blogs about cool stuff (mostly puppet related). Sadly I didn’t made it to PuppetConf 2015 where he gave a talk, hopefully I can meet him on PuppetConf 2016.

Robert, I owe you a beer!