I am back to using Puppet with my home lab, after just about a year running SaltStack.

I enjoyed using Saltstack, with its light-weight orchestration and fairly simple syntax. However, I am planning to get my RHCA by the end of next year, and one of the exams I am planning to take (EX405) to satisfy the requirement is based on open-sourcePuppet.

Essentially, in order to pass the exam, I must be able to:

Install and configure Puppet.

Create and maintain Puppet manifests.

Create Puppet modules.

Use facter to obtain system information.

Work with Git repositories.

Implement Puppet in a Red Hat Satellite 6 environment.

With the exception of the last one, I am pretty comfortable with the rest of the objectives. However, I wont make the same mistake I did with the RHCEexam by taking it for granted; so for the 12-18 month, I will be heavily managing my home lab with Puppet.

On that note, even though it had been over a year since I last touched a Puppet install, it was surprisinglyeasy to get back up to speed (yay for muscle memory). I was able to quickly get Puppet Server installed, configure R10kand deployed PuppetDB.

I did not putMCollectiveon, though - and I am not planning to anytime soon. After months ofusingwith Saltstack, I found MCollective to be quite limited for the amount of resources it consumes. Instead, for orchestration, Ill leverage Ansible to kick off my puppet runs, which, incidentally, is another expertise exam that is coming from Red Hat.

At this point, now my environment has been setup, it is time to start planning some Puppet-based projects. Stay tuned!

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