Plan for Puppetboard v5

[gdubicki]

We need to uptick the major version of the Puppetboard for at least 2 reasons:

• more and more dependencies are dropping Python 3.7 support, which has EOL on 27 Jun 2023,
• Stop using the default / completely random SECRET_KEY value #721

...but perhaps we could use this opportunity to add more breaking changes?

Maybe we could do something for performance but f.e. it would cost us dropping Puppet 5 support? 🤔

@bastelfreak , @mterzo , @corey-hammerton and a recent big contributor, @lcharreau?

But of course, if anyone else wants to chip in, feel free! I just ping some people to get them notified. ☺️

[bastelfreak]

Puppet 6 is dead now. I am fine with dropping Puppet 5/6 (do we eben have puppet 6 specific code?) and also dropping EoL python versions.

[gdubicki]

I noticed that we currently have a few features disabled by default which may hinder discoverability of them.

I think we should enable all features by default in v5. The features in question:

• Catalog view - bce33aee
• Class view - Feature: Add Puppet Classes view #799

If the latter would be enabled we should also think about how to configure cache and scheduler for it with reasonable defaults for typical Puppet deployments. Because I think that caching in the app memory (SimpleCache) and having the scheduler disabled by default is good mostly for development... Feel free to chip in regarding this, @lcharreau!

[bastelfreak]

I like the idea to enable both. I'm not sure if any form of cache needs to be implemented. The setup from @lcharreau sounds quite nice. We could just enable the views and document the setup from #799 in the README.md. If that's not sufficient we can still think about another option or people can disable the view.

[lcharreau]

Hello.
the Class view has been deactivated by default because it is potentially (depending on the number of servers) very resource-intensive (fetching events for each report) and we have several hundred servers managed by Puppet.
We've added a cache and a scheduler to be able to pre-compute the results at regular intervals (every 5 minutes).

The SimpleCache cache is very suitable if you only have one worker. If you have several workers, it is advisable to use a common backend such as Memcached.

The scheduler allows you to request Puppetdb only for new reports, so you need to configure the interval between 2 jobs according to the time between 2 Puppet agent executions.

So to summarise, if you have few servers (I couldn't give a threshold), I think you could consider disabling the scheduler and using the "SimpleCache" cache. At each client request, we'll parse all the events from each report.