Extending Puppet - Second Edition

Start pulling the strings of your infrastructure with Puppet – learn how to configure, customize, and manage your systems more intelligently

About This Book

• 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

Who This Book Is For

If you are a Puppet user, this book will help you on different levels. If you a beginner, we summarize the key Puppet components and give you the elements to have a broader vision. For more experienced users, you will be surprised by with topics on designing, implementing, adapting, and deploying Puppet architectures. If you are expert, you will find topics and information that is rarely exposed in other books, giving you an insight into Puppet's future and its usage on alternative devices.

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

In Detail

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.

Style and approach

This is a collection of specific information about multiple topics related to Puppet and its ecosystem. Starting from a review of the very basics to more advanced topics, mixing practical advice with important theory and broader perspective, along with implementation details.