I recently gave a talk titled “Managing Puppet Using MCollective” at the Puppet Camp in Ghent.
The talk introduces a complete rewrite of the MCollective plugin used to manage Puppet. The plugin can be found on our Github repo as usual. Significantly this is one of a new breed of plugin that we ship as native OS packages and practice continuous delivery on.
The packages can be found on apt.puppetlabs.com and yum.puppetlabs.com and are simply called mcollective-puppet-agent and mcollective-puppet-client.
This set of plugins show case a bunch of recent MCollective features including:
- Data Plugins
- Aggregation Functions
- Custom Validators
- Configurable enabling and disabling of the Agent
- Direct Addressing and pluggable discovery to significantly improve the efficiency of the runall method
- Utility classes shared amongst different types of plugin
- Extensive testing using rspec and our mcollective specific rspec plugins
It’s a bit of a beast coming at a couple thousand lines but this was mostly because we had to invent a rather sizeable wrapper for Puppet to expose a nice API around Puppet 2.7 and 3.x for things like running them and obtaining their status.
The slides from the talk can be seen below, hopefully a video will be up soon else I’ll turn it into a screencast.
