Puppet Redefines Infrastructure Automation

Petros Koutoupis — Wed, 15 May 2019 11:30:00 +0000

Puppet has long been regarded as nothing more than an open-source software configuration management tool. The company has become a standard for automating the delivery and operation of the software that powers everything around us. Well, this is about to change. Puppet has evolved and has positioned itself to tackle enterprise-grade problems. All of this and more, was announced on May 2, 2019.

So what makes this announcement so exciting? I sat down with Matt Waxman, Puppet's Head of Products to learn more.

Petros Koutoupis: Please introduce yourself to our readers.

Matt Waxman: I have been the Head of Products at Puppet since 2017. I have been in the Product space for at least 20 years, largely focused on infrastructure. Before coming to Puppet, I was in data storage backup, replication and disaster recovery. I am the guy who deals with roadmaps and user experience across our product portfolio.

Petros: What can you tell us about this announcement?

Matt Waxman: Automation of more than just the state of your virtual machines, containers and so on is extremely important. How do you enable more teams? It is all about service, safety and quality of delivery. This is what we are doing with Puppet to serve those exact needs. And with our latest release 2019.1, we simplify the experience in automation to meet those demands.

We enhanced our agentless and agent-based capabilities, such as supporting the automation of network devices (for example, Cisco and Palo Alto) and giving users the ability to automate anything and anywhere quickly, efficiently, safely and at scale. But some of our most notable changes are centered around our agentless task runner, Bolt. We introduced it about a year and a half ago. Bolt is an automation tool built to automate anything in your infrastructure without the hassle. It was very well received by the Open Source community. What is new here though is we have found that more and more customers and users are starting to automate from a development perspective. Developers have a constant need to stand up an infrastructure quickly for both testing and support. Not only did we make Bolt more user-friendly for the broader community, but we also added YAML support.

Petros: Why is this announcement so exciting?

Matt Waxman: The demand for infrastructure-focused automation is growing, and many companies are unable to scale to meet that demand. With release 2019.1, we made a lot of investment in not only addressing this challenge but also in simplifying the experience.

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A Use Case for Network Automation

Eric Pearce — Mon, 21 Jan 2019 13:00:00 +0000

by Eric Pearce

Use the Python Netmiko module to automate switches, routers and firewalls from multiple vendors.

I frequently find myself in the position of confronting "hostile" networks. By hostile, I mean that there is no existing documentation, or if it does exist, it is hopelessly out of date or being hidden deliberately. With that in mind, in this article, I describe the tools I've found useful to recover control, audit, document and automate these networks. Note that I'm not going to try to document any of the tools completely here. I mainly want to give you enough real-world examples to prove how much time and effort you could save with these tools, and I hope this article motivates you to explore the official documentation and example code.

In order to save money, I wanted to use open-source tools to gather information from all the devices on the network. I haven't found a single tool that works with all the vendors and OS versions that typically are encountered. SNMP could provide a lot the information I need, but it would have to be configured on each device manually first. In fact, the mass enablement of SNMP could be one of the first use cases for the network automation tools described in this article.

Most modern devices support REST APIs, but companies typically are saddled with lots of legacy devices that don't support anything fancier than Telnet and SSH. I settled on SSH access as the lowest common denominator, as every device must support this in order to be managed on the network.

My preferred automation language is Python, so the next problem was finding a Python module that abstracted the SSH login process, making it easy to run commands and gather command output.

Why Netmiko?

I discovered the Paramiko SSH module quite a few years ago and used it to create real-time inventories of Linux servers at multiple companies. It enabled me to log in to hosts and gather the output of commands, such as lspci, dmidecode and lsmod.

The command output populated a database that engineers could use to search for specific hardware. When I then tried to use Paramiko to inventory network switches, I found that certain switch vendor and OS combinations would cause Paramiko SSH sessions to hang. I could see that the SSH login itself was successful, but the session would hang right after the login. I never was able to determine the cause, but I discovered Netmiko while researching the hanging problem. When I replaced all my Paramiko code with Netmiko code, all my session hanging problems went away, and I haven't looked back since. Netmiko also is optimized for the network device management task, while Paramiko is more of a generic SSH module.

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