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

Reusability patterns


Modules reusability is a topic that has got more and more attention in recent years, as the more people started use Puppet, more evident the need of having some common and shared code to manage common things.

Reusable modules' main characteristics are as follows:

  • They can be used by different people without the need to modify their content

  • They support different OS, and allow easy extension to new ones

  • They allow users to override the default files provided by the module

  • They might have an opinionated approach to the managed resources but don't force it

  • They follow a single responsibility principle and should manage only the application they are made for

Reusability, we must underline, is not an all or nothing feature, we might have different levels of reusability to fulfill the needs of a varying percentage of users.

For example, a module might support Red Hat and Debian derivatives, but not Solaris or AIX: is it reusable? If we use the latter OS, definitely not; if we don...