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

Things change


Once we introduce a tool like Puppet in our infrastructure, everything changes and we should be well aware of this.

There's a wonderful term that describes what configuration management software like Puppet or Chef involve: Infrastructure as code; we define our IT infrastructure with formal code, the configurations of our servers, the procedures to set them up, whatever is needed to turn a piece of bare metal or a blank VM in to a system that provides services for our purposes.

When we can use a programming language to configure our systems, a lot of powerful collateral effects take place:

  • Code can be versioned with an SCM: The history of our commits reflects the history of our infrastructure: we can know who made a change, when and why. There's a huge intrinsic value in this; the power of contextual documentation and communication. Puppet code is inherently the documentation of the infrastructure, and the commits log reflects how this code has been deployed and evolved. It quickly...