guanwee-loo/learn-to-be-a-puppet-engineer

In this repository we map out skills that our PSE should have, we try link to existing documentation or blog posts, or if they don't exist, create it.

Puppet Language

Language constructs

• Resource type syntax
• Conditional logic
• Variables and scope
• Data types
• Defined types
• Advanced function usage (e.g. functions that accept lambdas)
• Puppet-language functions
• Relationships and ordering

Declarative coding concepts

• Resource idempotence
• The type, title and namevar of a resource
• The types and providers abstraction layer
• Idempotent exec resources

Tasks

• Passing parameters
• Passing parameters using powershell
• Returning data from tasks
• Secure coding practices

Plans

• Basic plan writing
• Error handling in plans
• Dynamic target manipulation (i.e. changing the targeted nodes using in-plan logic)
• Returning data from a plan
• Composition of plans (plans that run plans)

Ruby

Ruby basics

• Debugging & exploring ruby using pry (Use this to begin teaching people since they will be used to using a REPL and Pry is nice and UNIX-ey)
• Conditional logic
• Variables and scope
• Data types
• Object-orientated programming

Puppet-specific ruby

• Custom facts
• Custom functions
• Rspec-puppet and testing
• Testing using Litmus
• Types and providers
• Custom report processors
• Custom hiera backends
• Puppet faces?

Puppet Enterprise

Architecture

• Installing PE
• Macro architecture i.e. compilers, primary, secondary
• Micro architecture, what services do, how they are configured, what are their dependencies, are they stateful or stateless, can they be load-balanced, how are they made HA?
  • ACE-Server
  • Orchestration-services
  • PXP
  • Puppetserver
  • Console-services
  • RBAC
  • Certificate authority
  • Puppetdb
  • Postgresql
  • Code manager
  • File sync
• Tuning and scaling, typical load patterns
• Proxies and their effect on PE communications
• Log location and how to configure more detailed logging
• Common debugging tools and methods
• Metrics ingestion from support script using Support’s tooling
• Postgres debugging using pgbadger
• Garbage collection analysis using gceasy.io

APIs

• Which API endpoints are available and what they do
• How APIs are used in the normal operation of Puppet
• Puppet DB queries & PQL

Puppet Application Manager

• Containers
• Kubernetes
• Installing CD4PE
• Installing Comply

Coding Best Practices

• Style and naming conventions
• The roles and profiles pattern
• Component modules and how they are different from profiles
• Composition of profiles to reduce duplication (i.e. profile::base vs profile::base::windows)
• Data separation using hiera
• Hiera hierarchy design
• Handling of sensitive data
• PDK

Workflow

• Git workflows using r10k
• Development Practices for Ops
• Workflows using CD4PE
• CD4PE Custom deployment policies to implement advanced deployments

OS Skills

Windows

• General system administration
• Deploying Chocolatey
• Chocolatey Custom Packaging
• DSC
• Active Directory
• WMI Providers
• Privilege escalation
• Powershell scripting

UNIX

• General system administration
• Service management frameworks (e.g. systemd)
• Moving files between machines
• Configuring package managers
• Creating custom packages
• Users and permissions
• Scripting (Bash, Perl etc.)