Book Image

Puppet 5 Essentials - Third Edition

By : Felix Frank
Book Image

Puppet 5 Essentials - Third Edition

By: Felix Frank

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 scaleable and portable solutions, not only in terms of software, but also the system that runs it. This book gets you started quickly with Puppet and its tools in the right way. It highlights improvements in Puppet and provides solutions for upgrading. It starts with a quick introduction to Puppet in order to quickly get your IT automation platform in place. Then you learn about the Puppet Agent and its installation and configuration along with Puppet Server and its scaling options. The book adopts an innovative structure and approach, and Puppet is explained with flexible use cases that empower you to manage complex infrastructures easily. Finally, the book will take readers through Puppet and its companion tools such as Facter, Hiera, and R10k and how to make use of tool chains.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

Summary

All the development in Puppet should be done in modules, and each such module should serve as specific a purpose as possible. Most modules comprise only manifests. This suffices to provide very effective and readable node manifests that clearly and concisely express their intent by including aptly named classes and instantiating defined types.

Modules can also contain Puppet plugins in the form of resource types and providers, parser functions, or facts. All of these are usually Ruby code. External facts can be written in any language, though. Writing your own types and providers is not required, but it can boost your performance and management flexibility.

It is not necessary to write all your modules yourself. On the contrary, it's advisable to rely on the open source modules from the Puppet Forge as much as possible. The Puppet Forge is an ever-growing collection...