Book Image

Puppet Essentials

By : Felix Frank
Book Image

Puppet Essentials

By: Felix Frank

Overview of this book

<p>With this book, you'll be up and running with using Puppet to manage your IT systems. Dive right in with basic commands so that you can use Puppet right away, and then blitz through a series of illustrative examples to get to grips with all the most important aspects and features of Puppet.</p> <p>Install Puppet, write your first manifests, and then immediately put the Puppet tools to real work. Puppet Essentials reveals the innovative structure and approach of Puppet through step-by-step instructions to follow powerful use cases. Learn common troubleshooting techniques and the master/agent setup as well as the building blocks for advanced functions and topics that push Puppet to the limit, including classes and defined types, modules, resources, and leveraging the flexibility and expressive power implemented by Facter and the Hiera toolchain. Finally, send Puppet to the skies with practical guidance on how to use Puppet to manage a whole application cloud.</p>
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Puppet Essentials
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Understanding the need for separate data storage


Looking back at what you implemented during this book so far, you managed to create some very versatile code that did very useful things in an automatic fashion. Your nodes can distribute entries for /etc/hosts among themselves. They register each other's public SSH key for authentication. A node can automatically register itself to a central Cacti server.

Thanks to Facter, Puppet allows the effortless handling of these use cases. Many configuration items are unique to each node only because they refer to a detail (such as an IP address or a generated key) that is already defined. Sometimes, the required configuration data can be found on a remote machine only, which Puppet handles through exported resources. Such manifest designs that can rely on facts are very economic. The information has already been gathered, and a single class can most likely behave correctly for many or all of your nodes and manage a common task in a graceful manner...