This is the transcript of a talk I gave at PuppetCamp Paris & London 2016. You can find the slides can be found on my blag
Voxpupuli
Opensource š Speedtrain
whoami
Hello, my name isā¦ Igor GaliÄ ā Co-Founder of Voxpupuli, and of my own company, Brainsware
igalic ā profesionally, my motto can be summed up as āInfrastructure & Open Sourceā
@hirojin - on social media, it is generally, āDisappointing Expectationsā
genders are like shoes. if they don't fit well, it looks a bit weird, and feels uncomfortable.
— The Wrath of meā¢ (@hirojin) September 23, 2015
(and that's why i like to walk barefoot)
daenney and I started this project. He also started the fine tradition at puppetConf, to mention, or rather, proudly proclaim, that he is gay.
I am convinced that diversity cannot exist without visibility.
I am a very visible member of this community, so I want to be clear:
I am šqueerš
What is Voxpupuli
We are a collective of Puppet module, tooling and documentation authors all working together to ensure continued development on the code we maintain.
Some of my favorite words are in this sentence:
We are a collective of Puppet module, tooling and documentation authors all working together to ensure continued development on the code we maintain.
And while our website blurbs explain quite well who we are, what we do, why we do it, and how we do it ā We arenāt well known enough! This talk aims to change that.
Letās get started with
Who is Voxpupuli?
64ā¦ wait 65ā¦ no actually 66 volunteers
- admins
- many non-coders
- git newbies
Currently, Voxpupuli is made of ~64~ ~65~ 66 people who altogether have access to 130~ repositories. Most of those represent either puppet modules (100~) or puppet-lint checks, or some other kind of gem.
Except for those among us who are Puppet employees, none of our contributors are paid to do this work. And even the Puppet employees arenāt paid to do this work! We are volunteers, most of us are admins, many of us not coders, a lot of us donāt know how git worksā¦
Why is Voxpupuli?
- impulsiveness
Daenney and me founded, then Puppet-Community, out of impulsiveness. We were frustrated with the pace at which things were moving, and we figured that we needed a space where we can iterate faster than Puppet. Puppet is bound by contracts to their customers. We as admins, running primarily the open source version of puppet, on the other hand, are free to decide on our own when to move, upgrade or break something.
- necessity
Maintaining puppet modules is hard. Constantly ensuring quality is a never-ending race against bit-rot. The ruby ecosystem is evolving fast, and itās hard to keep up with the tools and best practices. Running this race alone can be exhausting, at best. But slipping up, falling ill, taking vacation, changing jobs, losing interest - being human, makes it impossible to keep up alone.
As systems administrators we strive to eliminate any possible single-point-of-failure. Often times forgetting that we ourselves can become one. Sometimes in this very process.
A puppet module can be tiny. Yet, at times, it may require a lot of attention and time. Even if not, if you have more than one module, it adds up!
With 60~ other people around, you are not alone. I believe that in Voxpupuli we have succeeded in eliminating the single-point of failure of the maintainer.
Daenney and I may have been the fire-starters, but Voxpupuli has transcended our hopes and expectations. It has become that proof that the sum is greater than its parts.
Voxpupuli is a collaborative space, and a safe-haven.
For people, and for their work.
How does Voxpupuliā¦?
So how are we doing this? With people; obviously. With robots, too. And with tools, that enforce standards and conventions. Letās start with the robotsā¦
Robots: vpci
Is a set of bash and python scripts that runs beaker tests for Voxpupuli, but also for Puppet. Of those modules that have beaker acceptance tests, we can be relatively certain that they will work out quite fine.
Robots: Travis
- rspec-puppet
- STRICT_VARIABLES
- rubocop
- release
Travis does the rest. Our .travis.yml is rather extensive. We have test
against all current ruby versions. We test puppet 3.x and 4.x. Always with
STRICT_VARIABLES. We run linters for our puppet code, and rspec-rubocop for
our spec tests and ruby code.
Sometimes rubocop can be a pain ā mostly because itās a fast moving target. However, enforcing a uniform style, and catching potentially dangerous code in a highly dynamic language, with a highly flexible syntax, is absolutely invaluable.
Finally, Travis also deploys our modules to the Puppetforge, and our Gems to the
Rubyforge. It does so, whenever someone creates a tag. And to make this
uniform too, we have the voxpupuli/release gem with rake tasks that check the
CHANGELOG.md, tag, bump the version, and push.
We tried really hard to make our release process as easy as possible, so that anyone who wants, or needs a release of the current master, can request that simply by creating a pull-request.
People: Contributor
- issues & pull requests
- feedback on irc & slack
So if you need a fresh release of puppet-mcollective, you can do that. All
you have to do is create a pull-request. And hunt-down someone whoāll merge it,
and run rake travis_release.
For this we have a broad set of channels: GitHub Pull Requests and Issues being the most obvious here. And you can use those for other bug reports, or to provide us with patches.
Structure and Communication
in Community Management
The plumbing repository is where you can track or report structural issues that need public discussion. Bugs in the community, or feature requests, if you so will. We also have a Code of Conduct email list, for privately disclosing issues.
All our channels, be that IRC & Slack, or Github, or Mailing Lists, adhere to the the general Puppet code of conduct. We also explicitly have the Covenant Code of Conduct in place in all of our repositories.
Every contribution, no matter how trivial or elaborate, or even wrong is immensely valuable. Treating it, and the person it comes from with the respect and humility strengthens our ties to the community, and can broaden it, too.
People: Members
- push buttons
Many drive-thru contributors circle around, and finally stick around. Whenever I notice that someone is doing my job, I invite them to the organization. Clicking on accept in that email is all they have to do. We donāt require anyone to sign a CLA (Contributor License Agreement), or anything like that. But, clicking that button is a powerful motion. Suddenly, instead of having one pet project, a person has merge access to all our repositories. This can be an exhilarating feeling. It might not last long, mind you, but even so, it motivates them to clean up a bunch of old issues & pull requests, or release a module that hasnāt been released in a while.
Again, the reason why itās so simple to get started with these things, rather than to be overwhelmed with it are our standards and conventions.
- We use module_sync to handle boilerplate code across repositories
- This ensures .rubocop.yml, .puppet-lint.rc, Rakefile & Gemfile, and .travis.yml to be same-ish
- Every pull request is checked by Travis & vpci
- Every pull request is reviewed and merged by someone who is not the author
If this sounds boring, all I can say is that boring code is good. We have far too much excitement in our jobs.
So having boring code code that helps us run our infrastructure give you that warm fuzzy feeling of reliability.
People: Community Gardeners
- grant & revoke access
- enforce coc
- listen
I am, in GitHub speak, one of the Owners of the Voxpupuli organisation. In GitHub terms this means I can grant (and revoke) access to our repositories.
In our own terms, it means that I
- hold the keys to our secrets
- get to be on the [email protected] list
It means that I have to listen ā often for clues ā to our community. I might have to moderate behavior, or (over)enthusiasm. If others have failed to do so, I have to enforce our CoC. And finally, I have to recognize and empower contributors, elevating them to members.
The Quantified Us
Often, just listening is not enough. In the days of Big Data, we can gather information about our community automatically, thanks to the magic of APIs! And we can proccess this Big Data with Big Data tools, such as CSV.
Currently we use
- underscoregan/community_management
- lbabhr/octohatrack
- duckinator/how_is
to gather the basic info on how our community is doing ā and more importantly who is doing things. Itās very important to us to reward all members of our community with the gift of merge access ā especially the ones the ones who may otherwise slip thru the cracks because all they do is report bugs / issues, and review pull requests!
What does Voxpupuliā¦
- ā¦ do for my company?
- ā¦ do for me?
We provide a broad set of well recognized modules. These modules are subject to the highest quality standards ā enforced by robots!
Our modules are released frequently (by robots!), and are compatible with the latest puppet versions.
If you have a popular module or gem, we can adopt it, and you.
Steal this process
At the off chance that none of our modules strike your fancy, you might still be interested in our tools, or our process.
All the tools we use are freely (gratis, libre) available. All the tools we produce are freely (gratis, libre) available.
If you are stuck in a silo, you may be able to alleviate your pains by adopting our tools to enforce standards, quality, and to make deployments easy.
If you are āstuckā in a flat hierarchy, you may be in the unique position of having responsibility, and power.
I advise your to take your responsibility for your team mates first, and to use your power wisely. If you adopt our management process, it will mean that on-boarding practially takes care of itself.
Be that new junior ops colleagues, or veteran developers, when you empower them you will earn their trust and their respect.
Thank you
- Catch me (us!) for questions! Come talk to us in
#voxpupuli! - ā¦join us!
Sources
- https://pixabay.com/en/gray-fox-kits-young-babies-956687/
- https://www.flickr.com/photos/yellowstonenps/18654448490
- https://pixabay.com/en/frame-mirror-picture-baroque-empty-308791/
- https://www.flickr.com/photos/timmy/5910881115/
- https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Accept.svg
- https://www.flickr.com/photos/widnr/6588149033
- https://www.flickr.com/photos/sejanc/866122048
- https://www.flickr.com/photos/pellesten/8286654017/