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

The parameters dilemma


In modules, we typically set up applications: most of the time this is done by installing packages, configuring files and managing services.

We can write a module that makes exactly what we need for our working scenario or we can try to design it having in mind that people with different needs and infrastructures may use it.

These people might be us in the future, when we'll have to manage a Puppet setup for another project or cope with different kinds of servers, or manage unexpected or nonstandard requirements, and we might regret not having written our code in an abstract enough and reusable way.

Basically, parameters, being our API to the module's functionality, are needed for exactly this: to let modules behave in different ways and do different things according to the values provided by users.

Hypothetically, we could enforce inside our code exactly what we need and therefore do this without the need of having any parameter. Maybe our code could be simpler to use...