Extending Puppet, 2nd Edition

Key Features

• Explore the wider Puppet ecosystem of useful tools
• Design and manage your Puppet architecture for optimum performance
• Write more efficient code that keeps your infrastructure more robust

Book Description

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.

What you will learn

• Learn the principles of Puppet language and ecosystem
• Extract the features of Hiera and PuppetDB’s power usage
• Explore the different approaches to Puppet architecture design
• Use Puppet to manage network, cloud, and virtualization devices
• Manage and test the Puppet code workflow
• Tweak, hack, and adapt the Puppet extension points
• Get a run through of the strategies and patterns to introduce Puppet automation
• Master the art of writing reusable modules

About the Author

Alessandro Franceschi is a long time Puppet user, trainer, and consultant.

He started using Puppet in 2007, automating a remarkable amount of customers’ infrastructures of different sizes, natures, and complexities.

He has attended several PuppetConf and PuppetCamps as both speaker and participant, always enjoying the vibrant and friendly community, each time learning something new.

Over the years, he started to publish his Puppet code, trying to make it reusable in different scenarios. The result of this work is the example42 Puppet modules and control repo, complete, feature rich, sample Puppet environment. You can read about example42 at www.example42.com.

You can follow Franceschi on his Twitter account at @alvagante.

Jaime Soriano Pastor was born in Teruel, a small city in Spain. He has always been a passionate about technology and sciences. While studying computer science at the university in his hometown, he had his first encounter with Linux and free software, which is what shaped his career.

He worked for several companies on different and interesting projects, from operating systems in embedded devices to the cloud, giving him a wide view on several fields of software development and systems administration.

Currently, automation, configuration management, and continuous integration form a part of his daily work in the SRE team at Tuenti Technologies.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Puppet Essentials
Chapter 2. Managing Puppet Data With Hiera
Chapter 3. Introducing Puppetdb
Chapter 4. Designing Puppet Architectures
Chapter 5. Using And Writing Reusable Modules
Chapter 6. Higher Abstraction Modules
Chapter 7. Puppet Migration Patterns
Chapter 8. Code Workflow Management
Chapter 9. Scaling Puppet Infrastructures
Chapter 10. Extending Puppet
Chapter 11. Beyond The System
Chapter 12. Future Puppet