Book Image

Extending Puppet - Second Edition

By : Alessandro Franceschi, Jaime Soriano Pastor
Book Image

Extending Puppet - Second Edition

By: Alessandro Franceschi, Jaime Soriano Pastor

Overview of this book

Puppet has changed the way we manage our systems, but Puppet itself is changing and evolving, and so are the ways we are using it. To tackle our IT infrastructure challenges and avoid common errors when designing our architectures, an up-to-date, practical, and focused view of the current and future Puppet evolution is what we need. With Puppet, you define the state of your IT infrastructure, and it automatically enforces the desired state. This book will be your guide to designing and deploying your Puppet architecture. It will help you utilize Puppet to manage your IT infrastructure. Get to grips with Hiera and learn how to install and configure it, before learning best practices for writing reusable and maintainable code. You will also be able to explore the latest features of Puppet 4, before executing, testing, and deploying Puppet across your systems. As you progress, Extending Puppet takes you through higher abstraction modules, along with tips for effective code workflow management. Finally, you will learn how to develop plugins for Puppet - as well as some useful techniques that can help you to avoid common errors and overcome everyday challenges.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Extending Puppet Second Edition
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Installation and configuration


PuppetDB is an Open Source Closure application complementary to Puppet. It does exactly what the name suggests: it stores Puppet data:

  • All the facts of the managed nodes

  • A copy of the catalog compiled by the Master and sent to each node

  • The reports of the subsequent Puppet runs, with all the events that have occurred

What is stored can be queried, and for this PuppetDB exposes a REST-like API that allows access to all its data.

Out of the box, it can act as an alternative to two functions previously done using the Active Records libraries:

  • The backend for stored configs, where we can store our exported resources

  • A replacement for the inventory service (an API we can use to query the facts of all the managed nodes)

While read operations are based on a REST-like API, data is written by commands sent by the Puppet Master and queued asynchronously by PuppetDB to a pool of internal workers that deliver data to the persistence layer, based either on the embedded HSQLDB ...