It is worth mentioning at the outset of this section that Pulp supports two main methods for the distribution of packages from the repositories created within it. The first is a kind of push-based distribution that uses something called the Pulp Consumer.

We will not be exploring this in this chapter for the following reasons:

• The Pulp Consumer only works with RPM-based repositories and distributions, and at the time of writing, there is no equivalent client available for Ubuntu or Debian. This means that our processes cannot be uniform across the enterprise, which, in an ideal world, they would be.
• Using the Pulp Consumer means we would have two overlapping means of automation. Distributing packages to nodes using the consumer is a task that can be performed with Ansible, and if we use Ansible for this task, then we have an approach that is common across all of our platforms. This supports the principles of automation in an enterprise context that we established earlier in this book around lowering barriers to entry, ease of use, and so on.

As such, we will build out separate Ansible-based examples for managing repositories and updates using the repositories we created in the previous section, entitled Building repositories in Pulp. These can be managed along with all the other Ansible playbooks and can be run through a platform such as AWX to ensure a single pane of glass is used wherever possible for all tasks.

Let's get started by looking at how to patch RPM-based systems using a combination of Ansible and Pulp.