Fervent Coder

“Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.” – Howard H. Aiken

Look around today. There is so much that you can do on Windows with respect to automation that just wasn’t possible a few short years ago. It’s hard to see what has changed because our memories are sometimes so short about how it used to be, so let’s go back about 4 years ago to 2010. PowerShell was still young, there was no Chocolatey, and things like Puppet and Chef didn’t work on Windows yet.

Folks were leaving Windows left and right once they got a taste of how easy automation was in other OS platforms. Well versed folks. Loud folks. Folks that were at the top of their game heading out of Windows. Many others have considered it. You’ve all heard the “leaving .NET stories” from some of the best developers on the .NET platform. But what you may not have realized is that these folks were not just leaving .NET, they were leaving Windows entirely. Some of this was in part to limitations they were finding that just were not there in other OSes. What you are also missing are all the folks that were silently leaving. For every one person speaking out about it, there were many more of the silent losses. The system admins, fed up with GUIs and lack of automation, leaving for greener pastures. The developers who didn’t blog leaving the platform.

But a change has occurred more recently that has slowed that process. I believe it is better tools and automation of the Windows platform. Some people have shown such a passion that they’ve saved Windows as a platform for future generations.

So What Saved Windows?

PowerShell – Arguably this could be seen as the catalyst that started it all. It came out in 2006 and while v1 was somewhat limited, v2 (Oct 2009) added huge improvements, including performance. PowerShell is prevalent now, but it had humble beginnings. When Jeffrey Snover saw a need for better automation in Windows, no one understood what he was trying to do. Most folks at Microsoft kept asking, why do you need that? But Jeffrey had such a passion for what was needed that he took a demotion to make it happen. And we are thankful for that because it shaped the face of Windows automation for all. Jeffrey’s passion brought us PowerShell, and it is continuing to bring us more things that have come out of his original Monad Manifesto from 2002.

Chocolatey – In 2011 Chocolatey furthered the automation story of Windows with package management, something that other platforms have enjoyed for years. Rob Reynolds’ goals for Chocolatey in the beginning were simply to solve a need but it has since grown into so much more and is now making improvements to become a true package manager. It wasn’t the first approach to package management on Windows and it is certainly not the last. But it did many things right, it didn’t try to achieve lofty goals. It started working at the point of the native installers and official distribution points with a simple approach to packaging and very good helpers to achieve many abilities. When Rob first started working on it, most of his longtime technical friends questioned the relevance of it. Rob did not stop because he had a vision, a passion for making things happen. As his vision has been realized by many he is about to change the face of package management on Windows forever.

Puppet (and other CM tools) – In 2011 Puppet started working on Windows thanks to Josh Cooper. He single-handedly brought Puppet’s excellent desired state configuration management to Windows (Chef also brought Windows support in 2011). Josh saw a need and convinced folks to try an experiment. That experiment has grown and has brought the last bits of what was needed to save Windows as a platform. His passion for bringing Puppet to Windows has grown into so much more than what it originally started out to do. And now it is arguably the best CM tool for any platform, as the Puppet Labs CEO stated at PuppetConf 2014, Puppet is becoming the lingua franca of infrastructure configuration.

The Effects of Passion

All of this passion for automation has really changed Microsoft. They have adopted automation as a strategy. They are moving to a model of openness, recently announcing that the entire .NET platform is going to be Open Source. They are getting behind Chocolatey with OneGet and getting it built into Windows. They announced PowerShell DSC last year and have made huge improvements in it since then. From where we are sitting, it appears Microsoft now gets it. The effects of passion have really turned the company around and has saved Windows. Windows is becoming the platform we all hoped it would be, it’s really bringing many folks to see it as a true platform for automation and that makes Windows a formidable platform for the foreseeable future.

• Share This Post:
• 
• 
• 
•   Short Url: wblo.gs/ffv

Recently I talked to Herding Code about the kickstarter, package moderation, OneGet, and where we are going with Chocolatey.

Listen now - herdingcode.com/herding-code-199-rob-reynolds-on-the-chocolatey-kickstarter-chocolatey-growth-and-oneget/

• Share This Post:
• 
• 
• 
•   Short Url: wblo.gs/feD

Well just after three years of having https://chocolatey.org, we’ve finally implemented package moderation. It’s actually quite a huge step forward. This means that when packages are submitted, they will be reviewed and signed off by a moderator before they are allowed to show up and be used by the general public.

What This Means for You Package Consumers

• Higher quality packages - we are working to ensure by the time a package is live, moderators have given feedback to maintainers and fixes have been added.
  
• More appropriate packages - packages that are not really relevant to Chocolatey's community feed will not be approved.
  
• More trust - packages are now reviewed for safety and completeness by a small set of trusted moderators before they are live.
• Reviewing existing packages - All pre-existing packages will be reviewed and duplicates will be phased out.
• Not Reviewed Warning - Packages that are pre-existing that have not been reviewed will have a warning on chocolatey.org. Since this is considered temporary while we are working through moderation of older packages, we didn't see a need to add a switch to existing choco.

Existing packages that have not been moderated yet will have a warning posted on the package page that looks like

Packages that have been moderated will have a nice message on the package page that looks like

If the package is rejected, the maintainer will see a message, but no one else will see or be able to install the package.

You should also keep the following in mind:

• We are not going to moderate prerelease versions of a package as they are not on the stable feed.
• We are likely only moderating the current version of a package. If you feel older versions should be reviewed, please let us know through contact site admins on the package page.
• Chocolatey is not going to give you any indication of approved. We expect this to be temporary while we review all existing packages, so we didn’t see much benefit to the amount of work involved to bring it to the choco client in its current implementation.

What This Means for Package Maintainers

• Guidelines - Please make sure you are following packages guidelines outlined at https://github.com/chocolatey/chocolatey/wiki/createpackages - this is how moderators will evaluate packages
• Re-push same version - While a package is under review you can continually push up that same version with fixes
• Email - Expect email communication for moderation - if your email is out of date or you never receive email from chocolatey, ensure it is not going to the spam folder. We will give up to two weeks before we reject a package  for non-responsive maintainers. It's likely we will then review every version of that package as well.
• Learning about new features - during moderation you may learn about new things you haven't known before.
• Pre-existing - We are going to be very generous for pre-existing packages. We will start communicating things that will need to be corrected the first time we accept a package, the second update will need to have those items corrected.
• Push gives no indication of moderation - Choco vCurrent gives no indication that a package went under review. We are going to put out a point release with that message and a couple of small fixes.

Moderation Means a Long Term Future

We are making investments into the long term viability of Chocolatey. These improvements we are making are showing you that your support of the Chocolatey Kickstarter and the future of Chocolatey is a real thing. If you haven’t heard about the kickstarter yet, take a look at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ferventcoder/chocolatey-the-alternative-windows-store-like-yum.

• Share This Post:
• 
• 
• 
•   Short Url: wblo.gs/fbB

I’m really excited to tell you about The Chocolatey Experience! We are taking Chocolatey to the next level and ensuring the longevity of the platform. But we can’t get there without your help! Please help me support Chocolatey and all of the improvements we need to make!

• Share This Post:
• 
• 
• 
•   Short Url: wblo.gs/fYg

Chocolatey has some big changes coming in the next few months, so we’ve started a newsletter to keep everyone informed of what’s coming. The folks who are signed up for the newsletter will hear about the latest and greatest changes coming for Chocolatey first, plus they will know when the Kickstarter (Yes! Big changes are coming!) kicks off before anyone else. Sign up for the newsletter now to learn about all the exciting things coming down the pipe for Chocolatey!

• Share This Post:
• 
• 
• 
•   Short Url: wblo.gs/fT4

Now that we’ve talked a little about Puppet. Let’s see how easy it is to get started.

Install Puppet

Let’s get Puppet Installed. There are two ways to do that:

1. With Chocolatey: Open an administrative/elevated command shell and type:

   choco install puppet

2. Download and install Puppet manually - puppetlabs.com/misc/download-options

Run Puppet

• Let’s make pasting into a console window work with Control + V (like it should):

  choco install wincommandpaste

• If you have a cmd.exe command shell open, (and chocolatey installed) type:

  RefreshEnv

• The previous command will refresh your environment variables, ala Chocolatey v0.9.8.24+. If you were running PowerShell, there isn’t yet a refreshenv for you (one is coming though!).
• If you have to restart your CLI (command line interface) session or you installed Puppet manually open an administrative/elevated command shell and type:

  puppet resource user

• Output should look similar to a few of these:

  user { 'Administrator':
    ensure  => 'present',
    comment => 'Built-in account for administering the computer/domain',
    groups  => ['Administrators'],
    uid     => 'S-1-5-21-some-numbers-yo-500',
  }

• Let's create a user:

  puppet apply -e "user {'bobbytables_123': ensure => present, groups => ['Users'], }"

• Relevant output should look like:

  Notice: /Stage[main]/Main/User[bobbytables_123]/ensure: created

• Run the 'puppet resource user' command again. Note the user we created is there!
• Let’s clean up after ourselves and remove that user we just created:

  puppet apply -e "user {'bobbytables_123': ensure => absent, }"

• Relevant output should look like:

  Notice: /Stage[main]/Main/User[bobbytables_123]/ensure: removed

• Run the 'puppet resource user' command one last time. Note we just removed a user!

Conclusion

You just did some configuration management /system administration. Welcome to the new world of awesome! Puppet is super easy to get started with. This is a taste so you can start seeing the power of automation and where you can go with it. We haven’t talked about resources, manifests (scripts), best practices and all of that yet.

Next we are going to start to get into more extensive things with Puppet. Next time we’ll walk through getting a Vagrant environment up and running. That way we can do some crazier stuff and when we are done, we can just clean it up quickly.

• Share This Post:
• 
• 
• 
•   Short Url: wblo.gs/f6t

Puppet was one of the first configuration management (CM) tools to support Windows, way back in 2011. It has the heaviest investment on Windows infrastructure with 1/3 of the platform client development staff being Windows folks.  It appears that Microsoft believed an end state configuration tool like Puppet was the way forward, so much so that they cloned Puppet’s DSL (domain-specific language) in many ways and are calling it PowerShell DSC.

Puppet Labs is pushing the envelope on Windows. Here are several things to note:

• Puppet x64 Ruby support for Windows coming in v3.7.0.
• An awesome ACL module (with order, SIDs and very granular control of permissions it is best of any CM).
• A wealth of modules that work with Windows on the Forge (and more on GitHub).
• Documentation solely for Windows folks - https://docs.puppetlabs.com/windows.
• Some of the common learning points with Puppet on Windows user are noted in this recent blog post.
• Microsoft OpenTech supports Puppet.
• Azure has the ability to deploy a Puppet Master (puppetlabs.com/solutions/microsoft).
• At Microsoft //Build 2014 in the Day 2 Keynote Puppet Labs CEO Luke Kanies co-presented with Mark Russonivich (channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2014/KEY02  fast forward to 19:30)!
• Puppet has a Visual Studio Plugin!

It can be overwhelming learning a new tool like Puppet at first, but Puppet Labs has some resources to help you on that path. Take a look at the Learning VM, which has a quest-based learning tool. For real-time questions, feel free to drop onto #puppet on freenode.net (yes, some folks still use IRC) with questions, and #puppet-dev with thoughts/feedback on the language itself. You can subscribe to puppet-users / puppet-dev mailing lists. There is also ask.puppetlabs.com for questions and Server Fault if you want to go to a Stack Exchange site. There are books written on learning Puppet. There are even Puppet User Groups (PUGs) and other community resources!

Puppet does take some time to learn, but with anything you need to learn, you need to weigh the benefits versus the ramp up time. I learned NHibernate once, it had a very high ramp time back then but was the only game on the street. Puppet’s ramp up time is considerably less than that. The advantage is that you are learning a DSL, and it can apply to multiple platforms (Linux, Windows, OS X, etc.) with the same Puppet resource constructs.

As you learn Puppet you may wonder why it has a DSL instead of just leveraging the language of Ruby (or maybe this is one of those things that keeps you up wondering at night). I like the DSL over a small layer on top of Ruby. It allows the Puppet language to be portable and go more places. It makes you think about the end state of what you want to achieve in a declarative sense instead of in an imperative sense.

You may also find that right now Puppet doesn’t run manifests (scripts) in order of the way resources are specified. This is the number one learning point for most folks. As a long time consternation of some folks about Puppet, manifest ordering was not possible in the past. In fact it might be why some other CMs exist! As of 3.3.0, Puppet can do manifest ordering, and it will be the default in Puppet 4. puppetlabs.com/blog/introducing-manifest-ordered-resources

You may have caught earlier that I mentioned PowerShell DSC. But what about DSC? Shouldn’t that be what Windows users want to choose? Other CMs are integrating with DSC, will Puppet follow suit and integrate with DSC? The biggest concern that I have with DSC is it’s lack of visibility in fine-grained reporting of changes (which Puppet has). The other is that it is a very young Microsoft product (pre version 3, you know what they say :) ). I tried getting it working in December and ran into some issues. I’m hoping that newer releases are there that actually work, it does have some promising capabilities, it just doesn’t quite come up to the standard of something that should be used in production. In contrast Puppet is almost a ten year old language with an active community! It’s very stable, and when trusting your business to configuration management, you want something that has been around awhile and has been proven. Give DSC another couple of releases and you might see more folks integrating with it. That said there may be a future with DSC integration. Portability and fine-grained reporting of configuration changes are reasons to take a closer look at Puppet on Windows.

Yes, Puppet on Windows is here to stay and it’s continually getting better folks.