Puppet Best Practices

If you’re already up to speed on Puppet and know how to write a basic module, this practical book takes you a critical step further with best practices for building out your Puppet infrastructure. You’ll learn how to avoid pitfalls that often leave many teams struggling to maintain what they already have.

Ideal for DevOps engineers—and written to cover the upcoming Puppet 4 release—this book shows you how best to deploy Puppet with long-term maintenance and future growth in mind. This book clearly picks up where other Puppet resources leave off.

• Leverage the main components of Puppet, including Hiera, roles and profiles, site.pp, modules, and external node classifiers
• Explore the purpose of each Puppet component and understand how it fits into the bigger picture
• Avoid common ways that Puppet components are abused
• Build a release management and deployment process using Git and R10k
• Learn about module design patterns, as well as sub-classes, resource relationships, containment, defined types, and scope
• Apply development best practices, including the Single Responsibility Principle, Don’t Repeat Yourself, and Separation of Concerns

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. The Puppet Design Philosophy
Chapter 2. High-Level Code and Data Design
Chapter 3. Coding Practices
Chapter 4. Puppet Module Design
Chapter 5. Resources
Chapter 6. Hiera Data
Chapter 7. Roles and Profiles
Chapter 8. Node Classification
Chapter 9. Release Engineering and r10k
Chapter 10. Extending Puppet