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

Changing the serialization format


Puppet server and clients exchange a remarkable amount of data: facts, catalogs, and reports. All this data has to be serialized, that is, converted into a format that can be stored to a file, managed in a memory buffer, and sent on a network connection.

There are different serialization formats: Puppet, during its years of existence, has used XML-RPC, YAML, and PSON (a custom variation of JSON that allows inclusion of binary objects), the latter being the currently preferred choice.

PSON has some problems: it was for some time pure JSON, but then it evolved separately to be adapted to Puppet convenience, one of the main differences is that JSON is restricted to UTF-8, while PSON accepts any encoding. This change was introduced to allow binary data to be sent as the content of files, but it also introduced the problem of losing control over the encoding Puppet code has to support.

Currently, another protocol supported by Puppet and maintained by the community...