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

Bolt for Orchestration

In this chapter, we will cover Bolt and Puppet Enterprise’s orchestrator. We will show how Bolt is Puppet’s tool for ad hoc orchestration, allowing work to be done that does not fit into Puppet’s state-based enforcement model. We will discuss how to configure it to connect to clients with different transport mechanisms and credentials and run simple commands and upload files. Furthermore, we will show how tasks allow single-action scripts in various languages to be run via Bolt, while plans allow combinations of tasks to be written using logic and variables in the Puppet or YAML language. The project directory structure will be examined, allowing Bolt content to be stored and shared. This will be compared to how plans and tasks can be stored in a Puppet module using the Puppet Enterprise Cloud Deployment Module (PECDM) Bolt project as an example. We will then show how Bolt can be extended with plugins to dynamically load information from...