Puppet Core 9.0 and 8.21 Released: Ruby 4.0, OpenSSL 3.5, Platform Changes, and Security Hardening

Did you know there's a new major version in town for Puppet Core? You might have heard about it through the grapevine or in the Are You Ready for Puppet 9? webinar that @gpatton and I recently hosted. The wait is over and Puppet Core 9.0.0 is now available alongside Puppet Core 8.21.0. Puppet Core 9 introduces significant runtime and platform changes, moving to Ruby 4.0, OpenSSL 3.5, and other changes, but the essential Puppet under the hood is largely unchanged from Puppet 8. The majority of upgrade effort will center on Ruby 4 compatibility and runtime dependency changes rather than Puppet language changes. If you are staying on the Puppet Core 8.x release track, the latest Puppet Core 8.21 delivers the basic support fixes and security improvements you might need without the major dependency changes found in Puppet Core 9. What matters most for the admins Before upgrading to Puppet Core 9: Test custom facts, functions, types, and providers against Ruby 4.0. Validate any Forge modules you use for Ruby 4 compatibility. Review integrations that depend on OpenSSL behavior. Verify any workflows that still rely on SHA-1. Confirm managed nodes are running supported operating systems. Review any custom code that depends on PSON or multi_json . Check deferred function behavior if you have custom types or providers. Perforce will be rolling out updates to Puppetlabs modules on the Forge based on their priority tier and dependencies. The first batch of these should be rolling out soon. Puppet Core 9.0 highlights These are a few highlights I pulled from the release notes. Make sure to reference the full 9.0 release notes to get all the details about what has changed! Ruby updated to 4.0.5: With a new Ruby baseline some deprecated syntax from older Ruby versions will no longer be compatible. This is the primary focus area for upgrades as you will want to validate your custom code and modules. The latest PDK 3.8.0 introduced some Ruby 4 validators to help you update your syntax