Book Image

Extending Puppet - Second Edition

By : Alessandro Franceschi, Jaime Soriano Pastor
Book Image

Extending Puppet - Second Edition

By: Alessandro Franceschi, Jaime Soriano Pastor

Overview of this book

Puppet has changed the way we manage our systems, but Puppet itself is changing and evolving, and so are the ways we are using it. To tackle our IT infrastructure challenges and avoid common errors when designing our architectures, an up-to-date, practical, and focused view of the current and future Puppet evolution is what we need. With Puppet, you define the state of your IT infrastructure, and it automatically enforces the desired state. This book will be your guide to designing and deploying your Puppet architecture. It will help you utilize Puppet to manage your IT infrastructure. Get to grips with Hiera and learn how to install and configure it, before learning best practices for writing reusable and maintainable code. You will also be able to explore the latest features of Puppet 4, before executing, testing, and deploying Puppet across your systems. As you progress, Extending Puppet takes you through higher abstraction modules, along with tips for effective code workflow management. Finally, you will learn how to develop plugins for Puppet - as well as some useful techniques that can help you to avoid common errors and overcome everyday challenges.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Extending Puppet Second Edition
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 11. Beyond the System

Puppet was designed as a configuration management tool for Unix-like systems. It runs on Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, AIX, MacOS and, since Version 2.7.6, also on Windows.

Over the years, however, it became clear that automation in a datacenter must also involve other families of devices: network equipment, storage devices, and virtualization solutions.

The same interest of companies such as Cisco and VMware who are investors and technological partners of Puppet Labs could only facilitate Puppet's steps into these territories. We are already seeing the results of these partnerships, and the vision of a software-defined datacenter is also taking shape under a Puppet-driven perspective.

In this chapter, we will review the current status of the projects that allow us to use Puppet in these categories of devices and technologies:

  • Network equipment such as switches, routers, load balancers from Cisco, Juniper, and F5

  • Cloud and virtualization with VMware, Amazon,...