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

Custom types and providers


If we had to name a single feature that defines Puppet, it would probably be its approach to the management of systems resources.

The abstraction layer that types and providers provide saves us from worrying about implementations on different operating systems of the resources we want on them.

This is a strong and powerful competitive edge of Puppet, and the thing that makes it even more interesting is the possibility of easily creating custom types and providers and seamlessly distributing them to clients.

Types and providers are the components of Puppet's Resource Abstracton Layer; even if strongly coupled, they do different things:

  • Types abstract a physical resource and specify the interface to its management exposing parameters and properties that allow users to model the resource as desired.

  • Providers implement on the system the types' specifications, adapting to different operating systems. They need to be able to query the current status of a resource and to...