Book Image

Puppet 4 Essentials, Second Edition - Second Edition

By : Felix Frank, Martin Alfke
Book Image

Puppet 4 Essentials, Second Edition - Second 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 scalable and portable solutions, not only in terms of software, but also the systems that run it. The free Ruby-based tool Puppet has established itself as the most successful solution to manage any IT infrastructure. Ranging from local development environments through complex data center setups to scalable cloud implementations, Puppet allows you to handle them all with a unified approach. Puppet 4 Essentials, Second Edition gets you started rapidly and intuitively as you’ll put Puppet’s tools to work right away. It will also highlight the changes associated with performance improvements as well as the new language features in Puppet 4. We’ll start with a quick introduction to Puppet to get you managing your IT systems quickly. You will then learn about the Puppet Agent that comes with an all-in-one (AIO) package and can run on multiple systems. Next, we’ll show you the Puppet Server for high-performance communication and passenger packages. As you progress through the book, the innovative structure and approach of Puppet will be explained with powerful use cases. The difficulties that are inherent to a complex and powerful tool will no longer be a problem for you as you discover Puppet's fascinating intricacies. By the end of the book, you will not only know how to use Puppet, but also its companion tools Facter and Hiera, and will be able to leverage the flexibility and expressive power implemented by their tool chain.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Puppet 4 Essentials Second Edition
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Summary


A template is a frequent occurrence and is one of the best ways for Puppet to manage dynamic file content. Evaluating each template requires extra effort from the compiler, but the gain in flexibility is usually worth it. Variables in templates have to be declared using any of the three available scope lookup notations.

The concept of virtual resources is much less ubiquitous. Virtual resources allow you to flexibly add certain entities to a node's catalog. The collector syntax that is used for this can also be used to override attribute values, which works for non-virtual resources as well.

Once PuppetDB is installed and configured, you can also export resources so that other node manifests can receive their configuration information. This allows you to model distributed systems quite elegantly.

The resource defaults are just a syntactic shortcut that help keep your manifest concise. They have to be used with care, though. Some language features such as the defined function (and its...