Book Image

Mastering Puppet - Second Edition

By : Thomas Uphill
Book Image

Mastering Puppet - Second Edition

By: Thomas Uphill

Overview of this book

Puppet is a configuration management system and a language. It was written for and by system administrators to manage large numbers of systems efficiently and prevent configuration drifts. Mastering Puppet deals with the issues faced when scaling out Puppet to handle large numbers of nodes. It will show you how to fit Puppet into your enterprise and allow many developers to work on your Puppet code simultaneously. In addition, you will learn to write custom facts and roll your own modules to solve problems. Next, popular options for performing reporting and orchestration tasks will be introduced in this book. Moving over to troubleshooting techniques, which will be very useful. The concepts presented are useful to any size organization. By the end of the book, you will know how to deal with problems of scale and exceptions in your code, automate workflows, and support multiple developers working simultaneously.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)

CFacter


Facter was earlier written in Ruby and collecting facts about the system through Ruby was a slow process. CFacter is a project to rewrite Facter using C++. To enable CFacter in versions of Puppet prior to 4, the cfacter=true option will need to be added to puppet.conf (this requires Facter version 2.4). As of Facter version 3.0, CFacter is now the default Facter implementation. In my experience, the speedup of Facter is remarkable. On my test system, the Ruby version of Facter takes just under 3 seconds to run. The C++ version of Facter runs in just over 200 milliseconds. Custom Ruby facts are still supported via the Ruby API, as well as facts written in any language via the executable script method.