Bolt for Orchestration

In this chapter, we will cover Bolt and Puppet Enterprise’s orchestrator. We will show how Bolt is Puppet’s tool for ad hoc orchestration, allowing work to be done that does not fit into Puppet’s state-based enforcement model. We will discuss how to configure it to connect to clients with different transport mechanisms and credentials and run simple commands and upload files. Furthermore, we will show how tasks allow single-action scripts in various languages to be run via Bolt, while plans allow combinations of tasks to be written using logic and variables in the Puppet or YAML language. The project directory structure will be examined, allowing Bolt content to be stored and shared. This will be compared to how plans and tasks can be stored in a Puppet module using the Puppet Enterprise Cloud Deployment Module (PECDM) Bolt project as an example. We will then show how Bolt can be extended with plugins to dynamically load information from...