What this book covers

Chapter 1, Dealing with Load/Scale, deals with scaling out your Puppet infrastructure to handle a large number of nodes. Using proxying techniques, a sample deployment is presented.

Chapter 2, Organizing Your Nodes and Data, is where we examine different methods of applying modules to nodes. In addition to ENCs (external node classifiers), we use hiera and hiera_include to apply modules to nodes.

Chapter 3, Git and Environments, shows you how to use Git hooks to deploy your code to your Puppet masters and enforce access control for your modules.

Chapter 4, Public Modules, presents several supported modules from the Puppet Forge and has real-world example use cases.

Chapter 5, Custom Facts and Modules, is all about extending facter with custom facts and rolling your own modules to solve problems.

Chapter 6, Custom Types, covers how to implement defined types and create your own custom types where appropriate.

Chapter 7, Reporting and Orchestration, says that without reporting you'll never know when everything is broken. We explore two popular options for reporting, Foreman and Puppet Dashboard. We then configure and use the marionette collective (mcollective or mco) to perform orchestration tasks.

Chapter 8, Exported Resources, is an advanced topic where we have resource definitions on one node applying to another node. We start by configuring puppetdb and more onto real-world exported resources examples with Forge modules.

Chapter 9, Roles and Profiles, is a popular design paradigm used by many large installations. We show how this design can be implemented using all of the knowledge from the previous chapters.

Chapter 10, Troubleshooting, is a necessity. Things will always break, and we will always need to fix them. This chapter shows some common techniques for troubleshooting.