Book Image

Puppet 5 Essentials - Third Edition

By : Felix Frank

Book Image

Puppet 5 Essentials - Third Edition

By: Felix Frank

Overview of this book

Puppet is a configuration management tool that allows you to automate all your IT configurations, giving you control over what you do to each Puppet Agent in a network, and when and how you do it. In this age of digital delivery and ubiquitous Internet presence, it's becoming increasingly important to implement scaleable and portable solutions, not only in terms of software, but also the system that runs it. This book gets you started quickly with Puppet and its tools in the right way. It highlights improvements in Puppet and provides solutions for upgrading. It starts with a quick introduction to Puppet in order to quickly get your IT automation platform in place. Then you learn about the Puppet Agent and its installation and configuration along with Puppet Server and its scaling options. The book adopts an innovative structure and approach, and Puppet is explained with flexible use cases that empower you to manage complex infrastructures easily. Finally, the book will take readers through Puppet and its companion tools such as Facter, Hiera, and R10k and how to make use of tool chains.

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Reader feedback

Customer support

Free Chapter

Writing Your First Manifests

Writing Your First Manifests

Getting started

Introducing resources, parameters, and properties

Interpreting output of the puppet apply command

Using variables

Adding control structures in manifests

Controlling the order of execution

Implementing resource interaction

Examining Puppet core resource types

Puppet Server and Agents

Puppet Server and Agents

The Puppet server

Setting up the Puppet agent

Performance optimizations

Completing the stack with PuppetDB

A Peek into the Ruby Part of Puppet - Facts, Types, and Providers

A Peek into the Ruby Part of Puppet - Facts, Types, and Providers

Putting it all together - collecting system information with Facter

Accessing and using fact values

Extending Facter with custom facts

Simplifying things using external facts

Goals of Facter

The resource type's life cycle on the agent side

Command execution control with providers

Summarizing types and providers

Combining Resources in Classes and Defined Types

Combining Resources in Classes and Defined Types

Introducing classes and defined types

Design patterns

Including classes from defined types

Ordering and events among classes

Ordering containers

Making classes more flexible through parameters

Combining Classes, Configuration Files, and Extensions into Modules

Combining Classes, Configuration Files, and Extensions into Modules

The contents of Puppet's modules

Managing environments

Building a component module

Replacing a defined type with a native type

Enhancing Puppet's system knowledge through facts

Refining the interface of your module through custom functions

Making your module portable across platforms

Finding helpful Forge modules

The Puppet Beginners Advanced Parts

The Puppet Beginners Advanced Parts

Building dynamic configuration files

Managing file snippets

Using virtual resources

Cross-node configuration with exported resources

Setting defaults for resource parameters

Avoiding antipatterns

New Features from Puppet 4 and 5

New Features from Puppet 4 and 5

Upgrading to Puppet 4

Learning lambdas and functions

Creating Puppet 4 functions

Leveraging the new template engine

Handling multiline with HEREDOC

Using Puppet 5 server metrics

Breaking old practices

Separation of Code and Data with Hiera

Separation of Code and Data with Hiera

Understanding the need for separate data storage

Building hierarchical data structures

Fetching data from classes

Debugging data lookups

Managing resources from data

Puppet Roles and Profiles

Puppet Roles and Profiles

Technical component modules

Implementing components in profiles

The business use case and node classification

Building roles from profiles

Placing code on the Puppet server

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Completing the stack with PuppetDB

PuppetDB is a specialized database REST API designed to interact with the Puppet master. It mainly comprises a PostgreSQL backend with an API wrapper. The latter was written in Clojure and runs in yet another JVM.

PuppetDB aids the master's secondary task of storing reports and other agent data. It is also necessary for some specific manifest compiler functionality. This is covered in Chapter 6, The Puppet Beginners Advanced Parts.

The best way to set up and configure PuppetDB is actually Puppet itself. Since the necessary tools have not yet been introduced, we will postpone this step until Chapter 6, The Puppet Beginners Advanced Parts. This is not a problem, because PuppetDB is not essential for basic master operation.

Nevertheless, after finishing this chapter, you should include PuppetDB into any new master setup because it allows for...