I took the plunge this weekend and updated my home lab to Puppet v3.7.3. Before you begin, check out the release notes. Puppet v4.0.0 is on the horizon, so there are a lot of new features and options available to you, along with bug fixes, but also some deprecations. It’s a great time to test some of the new features (like the future parser) while you can still turn them off, but as long as you’re coming from the 3.6.x series, your existing config should just work.

I had one issue with the upgrade. I started getting errors that classes couldn’t be found, regardless of which class I included and whether it was via puppet agent or puppet apply. Turned out, I had a manually installed puppet gem. Whoops! It was version 3.6.1 and I simply removed it and everything started working. You really shouldn’t have that issue, unless you’ve been doing testing on your master like I’ve been doing. Don’t do that.

While I’ve only been using it for about 12 hours now, I have to say I love the changes in 3.7.0. The big performance improvement comes from persistent HTTPS connections. Previously, new connections were initiated for (I believe) just about every file transferred, including plugins (facts, types, providers). This is a huge performance increase for me and I still have pretty small manifests. If you have really large catalogs, especially ones that transfer a lot of files, you should be really happy with this. The best part is, you don’t have to enable this, it’s turned on for you.

If you have the time this holiday season, give Puppet 3.7.3 a shot in your lab. You should be pleasantly surprised and prepared to upgrade production after the holiday!