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

Examining potential scenarios and approaches


Puppet is a tool that offers a world of order, control, and automation; we have learnt it, we know at least the basics of how it works and we want to install it on our servers.

We might have just a few dozens or several thousand systems to manage, they might be mostly similar or very different from one another, have very few things to be configured or a large number of resources to deal with.

We might manage them by hand or, maybe, already have some automation scripts or tools, Puppet itself included, that help us in installing and maintaining them but do that in a suboptimal way that we want to fix.

We might have a brand new project to build and this time we want to do the right thing and automate it from the start.

The number of variables here are many, every snowflake is unique, but there's a first basic and crucial distinction to make; it defines where our work will be done:

  • On a brand new servers infrastructure

  • On existing systems, either managed...