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

Components of a Puppet architecture


With Puppet, we manage our systems via the catalog that the Puppet Master compiles for each node, which is the total of the resources we have declared in our code, based on parameters and variables whose values reflect our logic and needs.

Most of the time, we also provide configuration files either as static files or viB templates, populated according to the variables we have set.

We can identify the following major tasks when we have to manage what we want to configure on our nodes:

  • Definition of the classes to be included in each node

  • Definition of the parameters to use for each node

  • Definition of the configuration files provided to the nodes

These tasks can be provided by different, partly interchangeable, components:

  • site.pp, the first file parsed by the Puppet Master and eventually all the files imported from there (import nodes/*.pp would import and parse all the code defined in the files with .pp suffix in the /etc/puppet/manifests/nodes/ directory)...