PuppetConf 2016

Yelp's PaaS based on Mesos is nice for deploying stateless application services, but we've found Puppet to be our tool of choice for managing clusters of heavily stateful applications like Zookeeper, Cassandra, and Elasticsearch, while supporting a high degree of configuration diversity. In this talk, I'll show how we have built "cluster native" Puppet modules for flexibility and scale. Our design allows us to: * Configure instances of a cluster independently, while still sharing core automation. * Dynamically scale clusters up and down as needed within minutes. * Provide control and tooling over these clusters to developers themselves. Along the way I'll show how you can tie together advanced Puppet techniques like Module Hiera Data, ENC, and custom types/functions to create robust automation.