My job title isn't Puppet Architect or even Config Mgmt Architect, and in most cases neither is yours. However, many of us have those responsibilities regardless of the size of our teams and systems. Those of us assigned this de facto title often have little previous experience or an instruction manual in how to do the job well. Over the past two years owning Puppet within Twitter we've trialed almost every technique, process, and strategy to help users get the config they want rather than the config they may settle for. User surveys, big refactors, smaller iterative changes, internal training, official training classes, and anything else that looked likely to help. I'll outline what worked and why and how to bring some of these processes into your own systems.
In the '80s and early '90s computers were a complicated disappointment. Everything I already knew how to do, such as technical drawing, I could do faster by hand. Years later I bought my first PC, mostly to play video games, and shortly thereafter finagled a job in tech support. After... Read More →
