Book Image

Puppet 5 Essentials Third Edition - Third Edition

By : Felix Frank, Martin Alfke
Book Image

Puppet 5 Essentials Third Edition - Third Edition

By: Felix Frank, Martin Alfke

Overview of this book

Puppet is a configuration management tool that allows you to automate all your IT configurations, giving you control over what you do to each Puppet Agent in a network, and when and how you do it. In this age of digital delivery and ubiquitous Internet presence, it's becoming increasingly important to implement scaleable and portable solutions, not only in terms of software, but also the system that runs it. This book gets you started quickly with Puppet and its tools in the right way. It highlights improvements in Puppet and provides solutions for upgrading. It starts with a quick introduction to Puppet in order to quickly get your IT automation platform in place. Then you learn about the Puppet Agent and its installation and configuration along with Puppet Server and its scaling options. The book adopts an innovative structure and approach, and Puppet is explained with flexible use cases that empower you to manage complex infrastructures easily. Finally, the book will take readers through Puppet and its companion tools such as Facter, Hiera, and R10k and how to make use of tool chains.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

Goals of Facter

The whole structure and philosophy of Facter serves the goal of allowing for platform-agnostic usage and development. The same collection of facts (roughly) is available on all supported platforms. This allows Puppet users to keep a coherent development style throughout their manifests for all those different systems.

Facter forms a layer of abstraction over the characteristics of both hardware and software. It is an important piece of Puppet's platform-independent architecture. Another feature that was mentioned before is the type and provider subsystem. Types and providers are explored in greater detail in the following sections.

Understanding the type system

Being one of the cornerstones of the Puppet...