I mentioned over the spring/summer that I was headed to PuppetConf 2015, which happened last week. It was a blast! I highly recommend that if you use Puppet, you find a way to make it to PuppetConf 2016 which will be held in San Diego.

There were a lot of great events, official and unofficial, throughout the week. I met a ton of people, way too many to mention individually, and made a lot of friends. I live tweeted three of the event days, which are storified, and here are some highlights:

Contributor’s Summit: This is a great opportunity to become involved in the community. You can contribute docs, code, or commentary. I’m serious about the last, lots more time was spent on designing than coding things. A few of us – Henrik, Felix, Vanessa, and myself – sat down to attack HI-118 and created something. Plenty of other people and groups created their own things. I saw lots of ways to do the same things and also the awesome puppet-retrospec, which creates rspec-puppet tests for all .pp code in a module. It’s very naive at this point, but it’s better than not having tests!

Sessions, Day One: At the keynote, Puppet’s new Application Orchestration was unleashed. This is seriously awesome. Define your application’s microservices, then assign nodes to provide the services. Need multiple nodes for a service? Assign more than one. Want a node to provide more than one service – say, a single SQL server that serves more than one database? Assign multiple services to that node. It’s pretty simple but pretty powerful. Of course, we only got to check out some demos in the demo section of the Exhibit Floor, but it’s very promising.

I attended a number of sessions, of course:

• State of the Puppet Community – Kara Sowles & Meg Hartley, Puppet Labs
• 200,000 Lines Later: Our Journey to Manageable Puppet Code – David Danzilio, Constant Contact
• Infrastructure Security: How Hard Could it Be, Right? – Ben Hughes, Etsy
• Identity: LGBTQ in Tech – Daniele Sluijters, Spotify
• Hacking Types and Providers – Introduction and Hands-On – Felix Frank, mpex GmbH

Sessions, Day Two: Today’s keynote showed a bit more of the Application Orchestrator but also focused on the speed and capabilities of some C++ prototypes for facter and puppet. They’re blazing fast. I also spoke on Puppetizing Your Organization! That was terrifying but rewarding. If you have something to share, PuppetConf is the place, it’s extremely friendly and rewarding. Here are the sessions I attended:

• Thriving in Bureaucratic Environments – Ashley Hathaway, IBM Watson
• Application Modeling Patterns – David Lutterkort & Ryan Coleman, Puppet Labs
• Building Communities – Byron Miller, HomeAway.com

After the last session, I had to head home immediately and take a red-eye. I missed out on the pub crawl and some of the after activities, but I had a great time while I was there. Hello to everyone I met there, thanks to everyone who contributed to my presentation and made it that much better, and especially thanks to everyone who showed up to my talk! Hopefully I’ll see you all in San Diego next October!

Update: I forgot to mention how great the Oregon Conference Center was. By far one of the most organized conferences I’ve been to and absolutely the best catered foods.