Book Image

Puppet 8 for DevOps Engineers

By : David Sandilands
Book Image

Puppet 8 for DevOps Engineers

By: David Sandilands

Overview of this book

As DevOps and platform engineering drive the demand for robust internal development platforms, the need for infrastructure configuration tools has never been greater. Puppet, a powerful configuration management tool, is widely used by leading enterprises and boasts a thriving open source community. This book provides a comprehensive explanation of both the Puppet language and the platform. It begins by helping you grasp the basic concepts and approach of Puppet as a stateful language, and then builds up to explaining how to structure Puppet code to scale and allow flexibility and collaboration among teams. As you advance, you’ll find out how the Puppet platform allows the management and reporting of infrastructure configuration. The book also shows you how the platform can be integrated with other tooling, such as ServiceNow and Splunk. The concluding chapters help you implement Puppet to fit in heavily regulated and audited environments as well as modern hybrid cloud environments. By the end of this book, you’ll have gained a solid understanding of the capabilities of both the Puppet language and platform, and you will have learned how to structure and scale Puppet to create a platform to provide enterprise-grade infrastructure configuration.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
1
Part 1 – Introduction to Puppet and the Basics of the Puppet Language
7
Part 2 – Structuring, Ordering, and Managing Data in the Puppet Language
12
Part 3 – The Puppet Platform and Bolt Orchestration
17
Part 4 – Puppet Enterprise and Approaches to the Adoption of Puppet

Scaling with compilers

  1. The review of Puppet platform components so far assumes that all components are present on a single primary server. However, as the number of managed nodes increases, it becomes impractical for a single server to handle them. According to Puppet’s documentation, a primary server can manage up to 2,500 clients on default settings. To handle the growing number of nodes, Puppet uses horizontal scaling, which involves using Puppet compile servers. In Figure 10.4, a subset of primary services is shown to be moved onto compile servers. These servers can be configured in a round-robin selection in the client’s configuration file or placed behind a load balancer. This enables multiple nodes to work together to compile catalogs while still allowing certain services to run on the primary server. According to Puppet’s documentation, with the default compiler settings, up to 3,000 clients can be served per compiler:
Figure 10.4 – Puppet compiler services
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