Puppet Enterprise 2019.2 has landed right on schedule, bringing teams new ways to automate complex workflows, and improving how nodes are managed.
As already announced at this year’s Puppetize PDX, one of the focal points of the new version is the handling of networking devices, such as switches and firewalls. If modules for device transports are installed, those devices can now be added to a Public Enterprise deployment via the Inventory option the console offers.
Once that is done, admins can manage them as they would agentless nodes and run Puppet and tasks on them. Those interested in this new feature are advised to keep the number of connected devices below 100 for now, to avoid a dip in performance on the master.
Another improvement relating to nodes is the option of installing Puppet agents from the console. If a list of groups a node was classified into is necessary, there is now the option to sort that list by name instead of ID only.
Apart from that, the Puppet team has added the capability to use plans, which are sets of tasks for the automation of complex tasks, from the Puppet Enterprise console as well as from the command line. To facilitate them better, the orchestrator has also been fitted with a new JRuby pool and configuration options for setting things like the maximal number of concurrently running JRuby instances and the length of the waiting period before an instance times out.
Customers can now use the newly available /plan_jobs endpoints to get information about plan jobs currently running. New /ssh/check_node_connections and /winrm/check_node_connections are meant to help when checking the availability of resources.
Puppet Enterprise 2019.2 works with PostgresQL 11, meaning users must upgrade external instances of that data store before upgrading master, compliers, and agents, and are advised to look into the accompanying update docs where necessary. The new version is compliant with the Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2 standards and should be fully operable on a number of FIPS platforms, making it an option for government agencies as well.
The full list of changes can be found in the release notes.