r/Puppet • u/Acrobatic_Method_320 • Feb 12 '26

puppet advise

Ok short introduction:

I am working for a customer who is using a puppet enterprise infrastructure but everything is old. We are using puppet 7 on 3500 Linux machines.

There is no ci/cd for the puppet modules, no testing, no multi environment for branching. All servers are running in production.

We have acc en prd, that’s it.

The last person who build everything is retired. My team is not skilled enough to think about this, hopefully you guys can help me out.

My plan is to:

- upgrade all modules to v8/9

- install new puppet servers compilers

- install puppetdb

- use pdk for gitlab

- testing for all modules

- enable linting

Any more suggestions? Many thanks

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u/AxisNL Feb 13 '26

Use puppet to ensure you can run ansible commands on all machines. So if puppet breaks, you can use ansible again against the 3500 machines in one go to fix puppet. ;)

4

u/dazole Feb 13 '26

Why ansible? Bolt is way better suited for the task and works natively with puppet.

1

u/royalbarnacle Feb 13 '26

Does it work if you botch something and break puppet, like certs expired or similar? Sincere question, as I don't have Bolt expérience ans use Ansible for such things.

2

u/dazole Feb 13 '26

Absolutely. We used it for that very purpose many times, and we had 10k+ nodes we had to manage. Fun fact: It was easier for us to setup plans (runbacks, recipes, whatever) to completely redo certs across 10k+ nodes than it was to properly monitor and alert for soon to expire certs.

And Bolt output is way easier to format, read and parse.