Book Image

Extending Puppet - Second Edition

By : Alessandro Franceschi, Jaime Soriano Pastor
Book Image

Extending Puppet - Second Edition

By: Alessandro Franceschi, Jaime Soriano Pastor

Overview of this book

Puppet has changed the way we manage our systems, but Puppet itself is changing and evolving, and so are the ways we are using it. To tackle our IT infrastructure challenges and avoid common errors when designing our architectures, an up-to-date, practical, and focused view of the current and future Puppet evolution is what we need. With Puppet, you define the state of your IT infrastructure, and it automatically enforces the desired state. This book will be your guide to designing and deploying your Puppet architecture. It will help you utilize Puppet to manage your IT infrastructure. Get to grips with Hiera and learn how to install and configure it, before learning best practices for writing reusable and maintainable code. You will also be able to explore the latest features of Puppet 4, before executing, testing, and deploying Puppet across your systems. As you progress, Extending Puppet takes you through higher abstraction modules, along with tips for effective code workflow management. Finally, you will learn how to develop plugins for Puppet - as well as some useful techniques that can help you to avoid common errors and overcome everyday challenges.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Extending Puppet Second Edition
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

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 how to organize code and put things together in a manageable and appropriate way.

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

There's not really a single answer that fits all cases; there are best practices and recommendations, but ultimately it all depends on our own needs and infrastructure, which vary according to multiple factors. One of these principal factors is the characteristics of the infrastructure to manage itself...