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

Summary


The world of systems administration changes, and Puppet does too. It appeared to us to be a very powerful tool that helps us in day-to-day operations, making it easier and comprehensible to provision and maintain infrastructures composed by either a few or hundreds of nodes.

In this chapter, we saw how this tool is evolving in several ambits. We saw on one side new features that will be included in the language and in the APIs for simplicity and to help us write more efficient catalogs. We saw how even best practices change: something that looked like a very good idea to extend Puppet, as was the case of the faces, now is looked on as something difficult to maintain, and new recommendations are given. We also saw that some resources as packages could be managed in different and better ways.

On the other side, at a more internal level, we saw that some parts are changing to give better support and scalability to any kind of deployment. The new CA, the direct Puppet initiative, and plugin...