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

Templating formats in Puppet – EPP and ERB

Templating in Puppet allows for the generation of content in a standard format, by substituting variables and using conditional logic to customize the content. Puppet supports two templating formats: ERB, which is a native Ruby templating format (https://github.com/ruby/erb) and has been available in all versions of Puppet; and EPP templates, which are based on the Puppet language, were introduced in Puppet 4, and are available in later versions of Puppet 3 with the future parser enabled.

Templates provide greater flexibility than strings but are less flexible than using resources such as file_line, augueas, or concat for controlling individual or groups of settings. Therefore, a balance of complexity needs to be struck when deciding whether to use templates or resources.

For relatively short heredoc files or simple strings, templates with variable interpolation may be sufficient. However, for more complex files and particular...