Puppet: Mastering Infrastructure Automation

Start pulling the strings of your IT infrastructure effectively with Puppet – learn how to configure, customize and manage your systems more intelligently in an enterprise deployment.

About This Book

• Step-by-step instructions to jump start your Puppet deployment and automate your IT configurations
• Design, implement, and deploy Puppet in your infrastructure and tackle everyday IT infrastructure challenges
• Gain expert understanding of Puppet’s latest and most advanced features

Who This Book Is For

If you’re an experienced IT professional and a new Puppet user, this course will provide you with all you need to know to go from installation to advanced automation.

What You Will Learn

• Write and employ individual Puppet manifests
• Understand how Puppet implements system abstraction
• Use Puppet to manage network, cloud, and virtualization devices
• Manage and test the Puppet code workflow
• Tweak, hack, and adapt the Puppet extension points
• Use exported resources to orchestrate change between machines
• Debug a puppetserver using Java techniques

In Detail

Puppet is a configuration management tool that allows you to automate all your IT configurations, giving you control. It was written for and by system administrators to manage large numbers of systems efficiently and prevent configuration drifts. Puppet gives you control of what you do to each node, when you do it, and how you do it.This Learning Path will take you from the basics of Puppet to extending it and then mastering it. We will start off with a primer on Puppet, its installation and get a sneak peek under its hood. We will then move on to designing and deploying your Puppet architecture, learning best practices for writing reusable and maintainable code, and executing, testing, and deploying Puppet across your systems. Finally, we will deal with problems of scale and exceptions in your code, automate workflows, and support multiple developers working simultaneously.This course is based on the following books:

1. Puppet 4 Essentials – Second Edition
2. Extending Puppet – Second Edition
3. Mastering Puppet – Second Edition

Style and approach

This learning path follows a practical approach, starting from the basic commands to advanced aspects. Through a series of examples you will learn the most important skills essential to manage your IT infrastructure effectively.

Table of Contents

1. Module 1
1. Writing Your First Manifests
2. The Master and Its Agents
3. A Peek under the Hood – Facts, Types, and Providers
4. Modularizing Manifests with Classes and Defined Types
5. Extending Your Puppet Infrastructure with Modules
6. Leveraging the Full Toolset of the Language
7. New Features from Puppet 4
8. Separating Data from Code Using Hiera

2. Module 2
1. Puppet Essentials
2. Managing Puppet Data with Hiera
3. Introducing PuppetDB
4. Designing Puppet Architectures
5. Using and Writing Reusable Modules
6. Higher Abstraction Modules
7. Puppet Migration Patterns
8. Code Workflow Management
9. Scaling Puppet Infrastructures
10. Extending Puppet
11. Beyond the System
12. Future Puppet

3. Module 3
1. Dealing with Load/Scale
2. Organizing Your Nodes and Data
3. Git and Environments
4. Public Modules
5. Custom Facts and Modules
6. Custom Types
7. Reporting and Orchestration
8. Exported Resources
9. Roles and Profiles
10. Troubleshooting