Book Image

Mastering Puppet 5

By : Ryan Russell-Yates, Jason Southgate
Book Image

Mastering Puppet 5

By: Ryan Russell-Yates, Jason Southgate

Overview of this book

Puppet is a configuration management system and a language written for and by system administrators to manage a large number of systems efficiently and prevent configuration drift. The core topics this book addresses are Puppet's latest features and mastering Puppet Enterprise. You will begin by writing a new Puppet module, gaining an understanding of the guidelines and style of the Puppet community. Following on from this, you will take advantage of the roles and profiles pattern, and you will learn how to structure your code. Next, you will learn how to extend Puppet and write custom facts, functions, types, and providers in Ruby, and also use the new features of Hiera 5. You will also learn how to configure the new Code Manager component, and how to ensure code is automatically deployed to (multiple) Puppet servers. Next, you will learn how to integrate Puppet with Jenkins and Git to build an effective workflow for multiple teams, and use the new Puppet Tasks feature and the latest Puppet Orchestrator language extensions. Finally, you will learn how to scale and troubleshoot Puppet. By the end of the book, you will be able to deal with problems of scale and exceptions in your code, automate workflows, and support multiple developers working simultaneously.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Designing a Puppet workflow


Puppet has undergone a lot of changes in code management since its beginnings. Even the general workflow has changed drastically. This section will help you to understand some of the history of code management in Puppet, some of the challenges, and, most importantly, some of the solutions for designing and working with a strong Puppet workflow.

Originally, we wrote Puppet manifests directly to the disk. We logged on to the Puppet Master via SSH and edited our manifests directly, treating most of our code like configuration files for remote machines. This model required custom backups and recovery for code applied to agents, and did not provide easy rollbacks. If something went wrong in a deployment, you were forced to take snippets of code from a backup manually and deploy it to a system. Some members of the community took to storing their Puppet code in Git. As the number of individual repositories grew in organizations, manually bringing in Git repositories individually...