In 2013, Simon Wardley started his writings about mapping. This technique allows us to discuss and predict to a certain sense what will be happening in the marketplace. In this blog post, we are going to use Wardley Mapping to look at some of the developments that are taking place within the Puppet ecosystem.

“I would like to start using a configuration management tool like Puppet, but I don’t know how my system is configured!” In the era before configuration management tools, most systems would be built by hand. Command by command the system would be configured. If the sysadmin would spot a problem, he would fix it immediately. Change after change, this process would continue. Resulting in a running system but with a configuration that’s is not fully known and definitely not repeatable. In this blog article, we are going to show you how Puppet can not only manage your configuration, but also help you to get to know all the details of your configuration.

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.