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)

Cross-node configuration with exported resources

Puppet is commonly used to configure whole clusters of servers or HPC workers. Any configuration management system makes this task very efficient in comparison to manual care. Manifests can be shared between similar nodes. Configuration items that require individual customization per node are modeled individually. The whole process is very natural and direct.

On the other hand, there are certain configuration tasks that do not lend themselves well to the paradigm of the central definition of all states. For example, a cluster setup might include the sharing of a generated key or registering IP addresses of peer nodes as they become available. An automatic setup should include an exchange of such shared information. Puppet can help out with this as well.

This is a very good fit. It saves a metalayer, because you don't need to...