puppet

I've been having weird, inconsistent bugs occur when running Puppet especially on new systems (where it's more obvious).

Specifically: I've seen cases where a manifest Notifies the apt-get update Exec to refresh the apt database, and suddenly the next series of package installs have failed with 'could not find package'.

During a rather boring conference a few weeks back, I decided to convert my own infrastructure from 'standalone puppet' (that is, a set of standalone puppet manifests that were executed by a basic shell script on each server I managed) to the 'client -> server' or 'puppetmaster' model (whereby a central puppet daemon controls the manifests, and servers connect to it for updates as 'clients'.)

You can read more about the different models here.

I've recently been doing some very innovative work for the very clever gents at Code Enigma, where I've been working on some interesting projects:

1. an automated 'zero-touch' dev/stage/live deployment system for their enterprise Drupal applications (developers no longer need to ssh in to servers to do deployments)

2. automatic 'one-touch' provisioning and configuration of new hosting cloud services.

(More on the dev/stage/live zero-touch deployment soon :) )