Book Image

Mastering Puppet - Second Edition

By : Thomas Uphill
Book Image

Mastering Puppet - Second Edition

By: Thomas Uphill

Overview of this book

Puppet is a configuration management system and a language. It was written for and by system administrators to manage large numbers of systems efficiently and prevent configuration drifts. Mastering Puppet deals with the issues faced when scaling out Puppet to handle large numbers of nodes. It will show you how to fit Puppet into your enterprise and allow many developers to work on your Puppet code simultaneously. In addition, you will learn to write custom facts and roll your own modules to solve problems. Next, popular options for performing reporting and orchestration tasks will be introduced in this book. Moving over to troubleshooting techniques, which will be very useful. The concepts presented are useful to any size organization. By the end of the book, you will know how to deal with problems of scale and exceptions in your code, automate workflows, and support multiple developers working simultaneously.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)

Summary


The classes that are applied to nodes should be as automatic as possible. Using a hostname convention and an ENC script, it is possible to have classes applied to nodes without any node-level configuration.

Using LDAP as a backend for class information may be a viable alternative at your enterprise. The LDAP schema included with Puppet can be successfully applied to an OpenLDAP instance or integrated into your existing LDAP infrastructure.

Hiera is a powerful tool to separate data from your module definitions. By utilizing a hierarchy of facts, it is possible to dynamically apply classes to nodes based on their facts.

The important concept in the enterprise is to minimize the customization required in the modules and push that customization up into the node declaration, to separate the code required to deploy your nodes from the specific data, through either LDAP, a custom ENC, or clever use of Hiera. If starting from scratch, Hiera is the most powerful and flexible solution to this...