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.

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Table of Contents (10 chapters)
Preface
Preface
What this book covers
What you need for this book
Who this book is for
Conventions
Reader feedback
Customer support
Free Chapter
1
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
Summary
2
Puppet Server and Agents
Puppet Server and Agents
The Puppet server
Setting up the Puppet agent
Performance optimizations
Completing the stack with PuppetDB
The Puppet CA
Summary
3
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
Summary
4
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
Limitations
Making classes more flexible through parameters
Summary
5
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
Summary
6
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
Summary
7
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
Summary
8
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
Summary
9
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
Summary

New Features from Puppet 4 and 5

Now that we have a complete overview of the Puppet DSL and its concepts, it is time to look at the newest Puppet features, which were introduced with Puppet version 4. The parser, which compiles the catalog, was basically rewritten from scratch for better performance. The milestone release also added some missing functionality and coding principles.

Puppet 4 and newer versions do not only offer new functionality, but break with old practices and remove some functionality that is not considered best practice anymore. This necessitates that any existing manifest code needs proper testing, and potentially needs lots of changes to be compatible with Puppet 4.

Within this chapter, the following topics will be covered:

  • Upgrading to Puppet 4
  • Using the Puppet type system
  • Learning lambdas and functions
  • Creating Puppet 4 functions
  • Leveraging the new template...
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