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.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

Managing resources from data

You can now move configuration settings to Hiera and dedicate your manifest to logic. This works seamlessly as far as classes and their parameters are concerned, because class parameters automatically retrieve their values from Hiera. For configuration that requires you to instantiate resources, you still need to write the full manifests and add manual lookup function calls.

For example, an Apache web server requires some global settings, but the interesting parts of its configuration are typically performed in virtual host configuration files. Puppet models them with defined resource types. If you want to configure an iptables firewall, you have to declare lots of resources of the firewall type (available through the puppetlabs-firewall module).

Such elaborate resources can clutter up your manifest, yet they mostly represent data. There is no inherent...