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In this episode, sponsored by Reductive Labs, I talk with returning guest Luke Kaines (of Reductive Labs) and RedHat’s David Lutterkort. David has been an active member of the Puppet community for several years now, and we spend much of our time talking about the projects he’s worked on that incorporate Puppet. We also get into a discussion of how RedHat internal IT uses Puppet in their for their own applications from development to deployment.

We start out talking about Augeas, one of the projects David is currently working on. In my horkly words, it provides a “configuration file normalization API.” That is, Augeas provides a layer to read in, modify, and then spit back out all sorts of *nix configuration files, each with it’s own syntactical essentracies. For Puppet – which spends much of it’s time updating those configuration files – the connection is obvious. Indeed, as Luke says, it wouldn’t be far fetched to think that, sometime in the future, Puppet would consider replacing it’s current config file engine with Augeas. In the meantime, there’s some docs on using the two together.

Next, having been around Puppet awhile, I ask David what other uses of Puppet he’s been seeing recently. This draws up a conversation about how RedHat’s internal IT uses Puppet through Genome through their internal application development process to build development boxes and servers. We get into a discussion of how this use of Puppet effects the development cycles and tries to address the “wall of confusion” between development and operations.

We next talk about Cft (pronounced “sift”) that provides a sort-of command line recorded for admins to build up Puppet manifests. We wrap-up by talking about Cobbler which sets up and configures Linux machines over a network. And, of course, how Puppet interlaces therein.

Disclosure: Reductive Labs is a client and, as mentioned, sponsored this podcast.