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

Scaling Puppet


Generally, we don't have to care about Puppet Master's performances when we have few nodes to manage.

Few is definitively a relative word; I would say any number lower than one hundred nodes, which varies according to various factors, such as the following:

  • System resources: The bare performances of the system, physical or virtual, where our Puppet Master is running are, obviously, a decisive point. Particularly needed is the CPU, which is devoured by the puppet master process when it compiles the catalogs for its clients and when it makes MD5 checksums of the files served via the fileserver. Memory can be a limit too while disk I/O should generally not be a bottleneck.

  • Average number of resources for node: More resources we manage in a node, the bigger the catalog becomes, and it takes more time to compile it on Puppet Master, to deliver it via network and finally to receive and process the clients' reports.

  • Number of managed nodes: The more nodes we have in our infrastructure...