Tech Topics

Streamlining Maintenance of Our Puppet Modules

Since the beginning, we've tried to support all current and historic releases of Puppet. We're big fans of Puppet - just like many of our users - so we went broad in our version support. We wanted to ensure the best possible experience for as many folks as possible.

At the time of writing this post, we're testing against 9 different versions of Puppet, both vanilla and Puppet Enterprise. We have a great testing infrastructure to do this work for us. However, long term maintenance to support all these versions, with even more great bits to come, is proving to be more challenging.

Moving forward

After pondering the challenges and tradeoffs, we've decided to shrink the versions we test against and officially support. Puppet is developed and released at quite a fast pace - one of the reasons we love it - so we'll make sure our modules always keep up with Puppet's latest releases. Specifically, we'll support the latest version of vanilla Puppet, plus the prior four releases. For Puppet Enterprise, we will support the latest two releases.

What this means for you

Moving forward, we will support the following:

Puppet Open Source: 3.2.x to 3.6.x
Puppet Enterprise: 3.1.x and 3.2.x

If you're running an older version, our Puppet modules should still keep right on working for you. However, with this change we cannot guarantee that will always be the case. We'd recommend upgrading to one of the officially supported versions to ensure compatibility, and because why not get the latest bits?