Book Image

Mastering Puppet 5

By : Ryan Russell-Yates, Jason Southgate
Book Image

Mastering Puppet 5

By: Ryan Russell-Yates, Jason Southgate

Overview of this book

Puppet is a configuration management system and a language written for and by system administrators to manage a large number of systems efficiently and prevent configuration drift. The core topics this book addresses are Puppet's latest features and mastering Puppet Enterprise. You will begin by writing a new Puppet module, gaining an understanding of the guidelines and style of the Puppet community. Following on from this, you will take advantage of the roles and profiles pattern, and you will learn how to structure your code. Next, you will learn how to extend Puppet and write custom facts, functions, types, and providers in Ruby, and also use the new features of Hiera 5. You will also learn how to configure the new Code Manager component, and how to ensure code is automatically deployed to (multiple) Puppet servers. Next, you will learn how to integrate Puppet with Jenkins and Git to build an effective workflow for multiple teams, and use the new Puppet Tasks feature and the latest Puppet Orchestrator language extensions. Finally, you will learn how to scale and troubleshoot Puppet. By the end of the book, you will be able to deal with problems of scale and exceptions in your code, automate workflows, and support multiple developers working simultaneously.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Efficiently managing code


Although writing code directly to the disk on a Puppet Master is the easiest way to get started with Puppet, it is the least efficient model for managing infrastructure changes with Puppet. Manual changes leave the users to manage the following issues individually:

  • Backup and recovery
  • Change management
  • Replication of Puppet Masters
  • Replication of Puppet environments

Without code management, backups are often performed via disk snapshots, or by simply bundling code and moving it to a separate location in case of emergencies. Manual code placement leaves the organization responsible for maintaining a cadence and process for backing up and restoring, and for change management. Without any code management, replication of code to Puppet Masters and Puppet environments is a fully manual process, which leaves all Puppet code testing and implementation to dangerous manual processes, instead of processes within a controlled environment.

Although placing code in RPMs can solve...