Book Image

Puppet 5 Cookbook - Fourth Edition

By : Thomas Uphill
Book Image

Puppet 5 Cookbook - Fourth Edition

By: Thomas Uphill

Overview of this book

Puppet is a configuration management system that automates all your IT configurations, giving you control of managing each node. Puppet 5 Cookbook will take you through Puppet's latest and most advanced features, including Docker containers, Hiera, and AWS Cloud Orchestration. Updated with the latest advancements and best practices, this book delves into various aspects of writing good Puppet code, which includes using Puppet community style, checking your manifests with puppet-lint, and learning community best practices with an emphasis on real-world implementation. You will learn to set up, install, and create your first manifests with version control, and also learn about various sysadmin tasks, including managing configuration files, using Augeas, and generating files from snippets and templates. As the book progresses, you'll explore virtual resources and use Puppet's resource scheduling and auditing features. In the concluding chapters, you'll walk through managing applications and writing your own resource types, providers, and external node classifiers. By the end of this book, you will have learned to report, log, and debug your system.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Distributing cron jobs efficiently


When you have many servers executing the same cron job, it's usually a good idea not to run them all at the same time. If all of the jobs access a common server (for example, when running backups), it may put too much load on that server, and even if they don't, all the servers will be busy at the same time, which may affect their capacity to provide other services.

How to do it...

Here's how to have Puppet schedule the same job at a different time for each machine:

  1. Modify your site.pp file as follows:
node 'cookbook' {
  cron { 'run-backup':
    ensure  => present,
    command => '/usr/local/bin/backup',
    hour    => split($facts['ipaddress'],'\.')[3] % 24,
    minute  => '00',
  }
}
  1. Run Puppet:
[root@cookbook ~]# puppet agent -t
...
Notice: /Stage[main]/Main/Node[cookbook]/Cron[run-backup]/ensure: created
  1. Check crontab to see how the job has been configured:
# HEADER: This file was autogenerated at 2018-03-15 19:13:55 +0000 by puppet.
# HEADER:...