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


In this chapter, we examined a few troubleshooting techniques that are useful in the enterprise. Troubleshooting basic network and system connectivity is the first thing to be checked. Using Puppet's Rest API, we were able to talk directly to the master with the help of HTTP tools, such as wget and gnutls-cli. We learned how to read the catalog and use jq to search the catalog on the client. Finally, we showed a method of enabling the expensive debugging feature for specific nodes by creating a debugging worker and directing nodes to that specific worker.

In this book, we took advantage of Puppet's Rest API to scale out our Puppet infrastructure in order to accommodate a large number of nodes. Working in the enterprise, the division of code from data is important to allow modules to be reused and to reduce complexity. A large number of nodes will introduce its own set of complexities. Working to reduce the complexity in your environment will allow you to grow and adapt quickly. Keeping...