The last post on example42’s blog was from December 2022, more than a year ago.

I was introducing tp desktop which is a quick and easy way to manage your desktops with Puppet and I was actively working on the new version of Tiny Puppet which was expecting to deliver the huge promise of being able to install EVERY application on EVERY Operating System (this is already happening for years) in EVERY way (OS packages, upstream repo packages, source code, release tarballs, containers…) with a single Puppet module.

Works on this release peaked at last Configuration Management Camp and then have been brutally interrupted by new activities we had to deliver for customers and these are the main reasons why also this blog has been silent for so long.

2023 has been a particular year for example42: almost no public activities, but a lot of work for customers, which resulted in the best year ever, commercially speaking, for example42’s mother company Lab42 srl (who said that Puppet is dead?).

Still, I think that lack of time is the excuse of the procrastinator, and even if this year has begun as active and busy as the previous one, I want to commit more time to public (and open source, as always) activities on Puppet.

So, what’s next?

No promises yet, let facts speak for themselves, when they will be ready.

For the moment I can anticipate the conferences where I will be present in the next months, see you there:

• AIDays in Milan, Italy, January 30, 2024
• FOSDEM in Brussels, Belgium, February 3-4, 2024
• Config Management Camp in Gent, Belgium, February 5-7, 2024
• Incontro Devops Italia 2024 in Bologna, Italy, March 15, 2024
• KubeCon Europe2024 in Paris, Frances, March 1922, 2024
• Google Next’24 in Las Vegas, USA, April 9-11, 2024

At the Config Management Camp I’ll be presenting a talk about Strategies for Puppet code upgrade and refactoring, join me there if you want to know more about how to handle code upgrades and refactoring in a sane way.

Keep puppetizing, because if you have to manage a system whose lifecycle is longer than a few weeks, Puppet is still the best way to do it.

Alessandro Franceschi