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Puppet Bolt orchestration tool
Lightning Strike
Because Bolt is a member of the Puppet product family, the question naturally arises as to how Bolt [1] differs from Puppet. Puppet is used for continuous resource management. In particular, it provides monitoring functionality and checks at short intervals whether the services in question are still available or whether infrastructure elements have gone missing.
Bolt basically zooms in on point-in-time changes. Instead of using declarative statements that define an infrastructure, Bolt is more about when commands are executed and which ones. In particular, the tool simplifies the execution or orchestration of tasks.
Admins benefit from the ability to run a script over any number of network nodes. Bolt uses plans that bundle the execution details. The focus is particularly on error handling, but comparatively simple scripts can also be used to handle complex tasks.
Overview
Ad hoc commands and scripts are run on the infrastructure with the Puppet Enterprise (PE) orchestrator or with Puppet's standalone task runner, Bolt. Bolt lets you patch and update systems and services, troubleshoot servers, roll out applications, and start and stop services. It runs on a standard workstation (Linux, Windows, macOS), and secure shell (SSH), secure copy (SCP), Windows Remote Management (WinRM), and other popular authentication methods (password, public key) connect to the remote node. According to the developers, the solution scales to more than 1,000 simultaneous connections.
Bolt uses YAML files or its own orchestration script wrapper, called a "plan." Above all, if statements are used in the scripts for concrete error handling. Administrators who are already familiar with YAML files can generate their tasks in this particular format and then use Bolt's built-in tool to convert YAML files into Bolt
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