Gathering facts about your system is an essential part of a Puppet run. Most facts can be fetched very quickly and don’t significantly impact the speed of your Puppet run. However, some facts can take a considerable time to resolve and have a big impact on the time it takes Puppet to run. Since facter version 4, you can cache facts. Facts that take up a lot of time and/or are not very volatile can be cached. Caching of facts is controlled by a configuration file on your system. In this blog post, we show you how you can manage the contents of this configuration file with Puppet.

The vulnerability in log4j has once again shown us that detecting and resolving vulnerabilities in your IT infrastructure can be a daunting and very time-consuming task. Now some tools are available to detect the log4j vulnerability. That is good, but only targeted at the log4j vulnerability. How about other vulnerabilities? You can be sure other vulnerabilities are coming. Hopefully not soon, but they will come! How can you be prepared? The best way to ensure that you can easily detect and fix these issues is to integrate them into your current way of working and your current set of tools. The Puppet module vulnerability does just that. This blog post will show you how you can install and use it.

hiera is a very powerful way to separate code and data in Puppet code. But sometimes, you need more than the standard functionality for levels that hiera provides. One way to keep configuration data from being duplicated over multiple levels would be to include other yaml files. Unfortunately, yaml doesn’t have any means to do this. That is why we built an extended yaml hiera backend that allows you to do this.

For some organizations, having dynamic hiera data can be a real time saver. Add a small change to your hiera data; there is no need for a Puppet redeploys, and off you go. Although this is fast, it has some potential downsides too. You cannot see who did this change and why and when it was done. Fortunately, there is a way around some of these downsides.