Puppet: Better together: Continuous Delivery for PE and ServiceNow flows

Continuous Delivery and ServiceNow flows: better together

Continuous Delivery for Puppet Enterprise (PE) is a tool for streamlining and simplifying the CI/CD process of your Puppet code. Continuous Delivery for PE offers a prescriptive workflow to test and deploy Puppet code across environments. ServiceNow includes a powerful Flow Designer. Why not combine Continuous Delivery for PE pipelines with the ServiceNow Flow Designer to improve and automate your change management process even further?

Change management mostly distinguishes between simple standard changes and more difficult changes. Standard changes can often be allowed as a category just once by the Change Advisory Board (CAB), after which each instance of that standard change can be implemented without further CAB involvement. Regular changes always need a CAB approval before implementation can start. Saying this, why not leverage Continuous Delivery for PE to get information about the complexity of a Puppet code change and use ServiceNow Flow Designer to automate the approval of standard changes?

Curious how this can work? Let’s put things together and get it working.

Continuous Delivery for Puppet Enterprise can work with the API of ServiceNow and create a change request in ServiceNow automatically. The pipeline step, a Continuous Delivery for PE custom deployment policy, is available at the Puppet Forge for free download. ServiceNow can work with the API of Continuous Delivery for PE to promote the pipeline in Continuous Delivery and even approve code deployments that require approval.

The following description on how to set up Continuous Delivery for PE and ServiceNow is based on a change process. For our change request approval process we decide that change requests containing only nodes with 10 or fewer Puppet resource changes (add, modify, delete Puppet resources) are considered simple standard changes and are allowed to to be implemented in the Production environment without further CAB approval. All other change requests have to follow a different process and get approval in a CAB meeting.

Set up Continuous Delivery for Puppet Enterprise

Continuous Delivery for PE comes with a powerful Impact Analysis capability. This Impact Analysis shows you which Puppet resources on what nodes will change if you proceed with deploying the code changes into (in our case) the Production environment. The Impact Analysis plugs into your Puppet Enterprise (PE) instance and compares the current state of each node affected by the changes with the state resulting from the changes. The following images illustrate an example Impact Analysis for a Production environment. The first one shows the summary view.