Continuous Delivery with Jenkins and Puppet Enterprise
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This is a guest post by Carl Caum, who works at Puppet and created the Puppet Enterprise Pipeline plugin. |
During PuppetConf 2016, myself and Brian Dawson from CloudBees announced the plugin:puppet-enterprise-pipeline[Puppet Enterprise plugin for Jenkins Pipeline]. Let’s take a look at how the plugin makes it trivial to use Puppet to perform some or all of the deployment tasks in continuous delivery pipelines.
Jenkins Pipeline introduced an amazing world where the definition for a pipeline is managed from the same version control repository as the code delivered by the pipeline. This is a powerful idea, and one I felt complemented Puppet’s automation strengths. I wanted to make it trivial to control Puppet Enterprise’s orchestration and infrastructure code management capabilities, as well as set hierarchical configuration data and use Puppet’s inventory data system as a source of truth – all from a Pipeline script. The result was the Puppet Enterprise plugin, which fully buys into the Pipeline ideals by providing methods to control the different capabilities in Puppet Enterprise. The methods provide ways to query PuppetDB, set Hiera key/value pairs, deploy Puppet code environments with Code Management, and kick off orchestrated Puppet runs with the Orchestrator.
The Puppet Enterprise for Jenkins Pipeline plugin
The Puppet Enterprise for Jenkins Pipeline plugin itself has zero system dependencies. You need only to install the plugin from the update center. The plugin uses APIs available in Puppet Enterprise to do its work. Since the PuppetDB query, Code Management, and Orchestrator APIs are all backed by Puppet Enterprise’s role-based access control (RBAC) system, it’s easy to restrict what pipelines are allowed to control in Puppet Enterprise. To learn more about RBAC in Puppet Enterprise, read the docs here.
Configuring
Configuring the plugin is fairly straight forward. It takes three simple steps:
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Set the address of the Puppet server
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Create a Jenkins credential with a Pupppet Enterprise RBAC authentication token
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Configure the Hiera backend
Set the Puppet Enterprise Server Address
Go to Jenkins > Manage Jenkins > Puppet Enterprise page. Put the DNS address of the Puppet server in the Puppet Master Address text field. Click the Test Connection button to verify the server is reachable, the Puppet CA certificate is retrievable, and HTTPS connections are successful. Once the test succeeds, Click Save.
Create a Jenkins Credentials Entry
The plugin uses the Jenkins built-in credentials system (the plain-credentials plugin) to store and refer RBAC tokens to Puppet Enterprise for authentication and authorization. First, generate an RBAC token in Puppet Enterprise by following the instructions on the docs site. Next, create a new Jenkins Credentials item with Kind Secret text and the Secret value the Puppet Enterprise RBAC token. It’s highly recommended to give the credential an ID value that’s descriptive and identifiable. You’ll use it in your Pipeline scripts.
In your Jenkinsfile, use the puppet.credentials method to set all future Puppet
methods to use the RBAC token. For example:
puppet.credentials 'pe-team-token'Configure the Hiera Backend
The plugin exposes an HTTP API for performing Hiera data lookups for key/value pairs managed by Pipeline jobs. To configure Hiera on the Puppet compile master(s) to query the Jenkins Hiera data store backend, use the hiera-http backend. On the Puppet Enterprise compile master(s), run the following commands:
/opt/puppetlabs/puppet/bin/gem install hiera-http /opt/puppetlabs/bin/puppetserver gem install hiera-http
Now you can configure the /etc/puppetlabs/puppet/hiera.yaml file. The following configuration instructs Hiera to first look to the Hiera yaml files in the Puppet code’s environment, then fall back to the http backend. The http backend will first query the Hiera data store API looking for the key in the scope with the same name as the node. If nothing’s found, look for the key in the node’s environments. You can use any Facter fact to match scope names.
:backends:
- yaml
- http
:http:
:host: jenkins.example.com
:port: 8080
:output: json
:use_auth: true
:auth_user: <user>
:auth_pass: <pass>
:cache_timeout: 10
:failure: graceful
:paths:
- /hiera/lookup?path=%{clientcert}&key=%{key}
- /hiera/lookup?path=%{environment}&key=%{key}
Finally, restart the pe-puppetserver process to pick up the new configs:
/opt/puppetlabs/bin/puppet resource service pe-puppetserver ensure=stopped /opt/puppetlabs/bin/puppet resource service pe-puppetserver ensure=running
Hiera HTTP Authentication
If Jenkins' Global Security is configured to allow unauthenticated read-only access, the 'use_auth', 'auth_pass', and 'auth_user' parameters are unnecessary. Otherwise, create a local Jenkins user that has permissions to view the Hiera Data Lookup page and use that user’s credentials for the hiera.yaml configuration.
Querying the infrastructure
PuppetDB is an extensive data store that holds every bit of information Puppet generates and collects across every system Puppet is installed on. PuppetDB provides a sweet query language called PQL. With PQL, you can ask complex questions of your infrastructure such as "How many production Red Hat systems are there with the openssl package installed?" or "What us-west-2c nodes with the MyApp role that were created in the last 24 hours?"
This can be a powerful tool for parts of your pipeline where you need to perform specific operations on subsets of the infrastructure like draining a loadbalancer.
Here’s an example using the puppet.query method:
results = puppet.query '''
inventory[certname] {
facts.os.name = "RedHat" and
facts.ec2_metadata.placement.availability-zone = "us-west-2c" and
facts.uptime_hours < 24
}'''The query returns an array of matching items. The results can be
iterated on, and even passed to a series of puppet.job calls. For example, the
following code will query all nodes in production that experienced a failure on
the last Puppet run.
results = puppet.query 'nodes { latest_report_status = "failed" and catalog_environment = "production"}'Note that once you can use closures in Pipeline scripts, doing the above example will be much simpler.
Creating an orchestrator job
The orchestration service in Puppet Enterprise is a tool to perform orchestrated Puppet runs across as broad or as targeted an infrastructure as you need at different parts of a pipeline. You can use the orchestrator to update applications in an environment, or update a specific list of nodes, or update nodes across a set of nodes that match certain criteria. In each scenario, Puppet will always push distributed changes in the correct order by respecting the cross-node dependencies.
To create a job in the Puppet orchestrator from a Jenkins pipeline, use the
puppet.job method. The puppet.job method will create a new orchestrator job,
monitor the job for completion, and determine if any Puppet runs failed. If
there were failures, the pipeline will fail.
The following are just some examples of how to run Puppet orchestration jobs against the infrastructure you need to target.
Target an entire environment:
puppet.job 'production'Target instances of an application in production:
puppet.job 'production', application: 'Myapp'Target a specific list of nodes:
puppet.job 'production', nodes: ['db.example.com','appserver01.example.com','appserver02.example.com']Target nodes matching a complex set if criteria:
puppet.job 'production', query: 'inventory[certname] { facts.os.name = "RedHat" and facts.ec2_metadata.placement.availability-zone = "us-west-2c" and uptime_hours < 24 }'As you can see, the puppet.job command means you can be as broad or as targeted
as you need to be for different parts of your pipeline. There are many other
options you can add to the puppet.job method call, such as setting the Puppet
runs to noop, or giving the orchestrator a maximum concurrency limit.
Learn
more about the orchestrator here.
Updating Puppet code
If you’re using Code Management in Puppet Enterprise (and you should), you can ensure that all the modules, site manifests, Hiera data, and roles and profiles are staged, synced, and ready across all your Puppet masters, direct from your Jenkins pipeline.
To update Puppet code across all Puppet masters, use the puppet.codeDeploy method:
puppet.codeDeploy 'staging'Setting Hiera values
The plugin includes an experimental feature to set Hiera key/value pairs. There are many cases where you need to promote information through a pipeline, such as a build version or artifact location. Doing so is very difficult in Puppet, since data promotion almost always involves changing Hiera files and committing to version control.
The plugin exposes an HTTP API endpoint that Hiera can query using the hiera-http backend. With the backend configured on the Puppet master(s), key/value pairs can be set to scopes. A scope is arbitrary and can be anything you like, such as a Puppet environment, a node’s certname, or the name of a Facter fact like operatingsystem or domain.
To set a Hiera value from a pipeline, use the puppet.hiera method.
puppet.hiera scope: 'staging', key: 'build-version', value: env.BUILD_IDNow you can set the same key with the same value to the production scope later
in the pipeline, followed by a call to puppet.job to push the change out.
Examples
The plugin’s Github repository contains a set of example Pipeline scripts. Feel free to issue pull requests to add your own scripts!
What’s next
I’m pretty excited to see how this is going to help simplify continuous delivery pipelines. I encourage everyone to get started with continuous delivery today, even if it’s just a simple pipeline. As your practices evolve, you can begin to add automated tests, automate away manual checkpoints, start to incorporate InfoSec tests, and include phases for practices like patch management that require lots of manual approvals, verifications and rollouts. You’ll be glad you did.
 | Carl Caum This author has no biography defined. See social media links referenced below. |
