WebLogic is a rich JEE container. There is a lot of stuff you can define and settings you need to manage. In the blog post “Using Puppet to install and manage your WebLogic infrastructure”, we used Puppet to install the basic WebLogic software and create a simple WebLogic domain. In this blog post we are going to show you how to use the custom types provided by the wls_config module, to extend this domain and add JMS servers, queues, and topics.

Ever since the introduction of the create_resources function, Puppet enabled us to store resource definitions in hiera and create them at run-time. This allowed us to define resources both in hiera data as well as in Puppet manifests. But when do you put something in hiera and when do you use regular Puppet code? In this blog post, we are going to give you some guidelines.

The Puppet create_resources function allows you to easy create a lot of objects. It is often used together with hiera lookups. But filling your YAML files, with resources, makes them big and hard to manage. In the previous blog post, we introduced Connect and showed you how Connect makes it easy to manage your hiera configuration. In this blog post we are going to show you even more powerful Connect stuff.

We love Hiera. When writing infrastructure as code, Hiera allows us to separate the what from the who. Separate the settings from the way the settings are applied. The default language for Hiera is YAML. YAML is a simple way to describe the data. But when your configuration grows, you start to notice some troubles. Your YAML files start to become bigger and bigger and slowly but surely become incomprehensible. You would like to reference other values. YAML supports this….. but not between different files. And the * and & syntax YAML uses for defines and references, becomes a hassle when you use it much. In this blog post we are going to show you Connect. Connect add’s steroids to your Hiera and allows you much more flexibility than YAML.