Chapter 4. Designing Puppet Architectures

Puppet is an extensible automation framework, a tool, and a language. We can do great things with it, and we can do them in many different ways. Besides the technicalities of learning the basics of its DSL, one of the biggest challenges for new and not-so-new users of Puppet is to organize code and put things together in a manageable and appropriate way.

It's hard to find a comprehensive documentation on how to use public code (modules) with our custom modules and data, where to place our logic, how to maintain and scale it, and generally, how to manage the resources that we want in our nodes and the data that defines them safely and effectively.

There's not really a single answer that fits all these cases. There are best practices, recommendations, and many debates in the community, but ultimately, it all depends on our own needs and infrastructure, which vary according to multiple factors, such as the following: