Virtual Puppet Camp America East

With the current COVID-19 situation, many events have had to be cancelled, while some others have been moved online instead. This is the approach that Puppet Inc. has chosen to take with the three Puppet Camps planned this year.

The whole Puppet community has been pretty excited to get back to Puppet Camps after a few of years without them, and some feared that moving them online would miss these community-centered meetings, where human contact is at least as important as technical content.

The first of these events, the Virtual Puppet Camp America East, took place yesterday in replacement for the Boston Puppet Camp, and it was really good. Not only was there good content but the community chat on Slack was constructive and rich.

Talks

The event started with a keynote by Puppet’s CEO, Yvonne Wassenaar, on what the changes to our lives in the last two months mean for businesses. She presented the recent progress on Puppet’s products, including Puppet Remediate, which is gaining traction as a security compliance tool.

The first technical talk was given by John Rogers, from SwissRe, about automating Windows nodes using local GPOs. It summarized 3 years of work using LGPO and other approaches (security options, etc.). John was kind enough to mention Camptocamp’s contribution in getting these new types and providers in shape. We’re looking forward to the next steps in open-sourcing the great work we’ve helped them achieve in improving Windows Automation with Puppet, so stay tuned for news on this front!

Next Ranjit Viswakumar talked about automating provisioning using Terraform’s Puppet provisioner, based on Bolt. This a great approach bridging both worlds of provisioning and node lifecycle. Community chat around that talk was the occasion to mention that this setup can be complemented by Camptocamp’s Terraform providers to track PuppetDB nodes and PuppetCA certificates and ensure proper cleaning upon node deletion.

Kendall Moore from OnyxPoint then presented SIMP, a tool based on Puppet and open-sourced by the NSA, which has been helping organizations enforce security compliance rules for years.

The last talk, by Shane Smith, was another approach to GPOs, by converting them to Puppet manifests using a tool called WinPuppetTools. It will definitely be interesting to see how this project could integrate with SwissRe’s approach of managing GPOs locally using Puppet!

Videos of the talks should be available online soon if you’ve missed this event —or if you’d like to watch them again.

The event finished with a scavenger hunt using hints on virtual machines. A fun game thanks to Ben Ford!