Puppet 5 Essentials Third Edition

Key Features

• Breeze through Puppet's key features and performance improvements to bring real advantages to your IT infrastructure
• Discover Puppet best practices to help you avoid common mistakes and pitfalls
• Examples to help you get to grips with Puppet and succeed with everyday IT automation

Book Description

Puppet is a configuration management tool that allows you to automate all your IT configurations, giving you control over what you do to each Puppet Agent in a network, and when and how you do it. In this age of digital delivery and ubiquitous Internet presence, it's becoming increasingly important to implement scaleable and portable solutions, not only in terms of software, but also the system that runs it.

This book gets you started quickly with Puppet and its tools in the right way. It highlights improvements in Puppet and provides solutions for upgrading. It starts with a quick introduction to Puppet in order to quickly get your IT automation platform in place. Then you learn about the Puppet Agent and its installation and configuration along with Puppet Server and its scaling options. The book adopts an innovative structure and approach, and Puppet is explained with flexible use cases that empower you to manage complex infrastructures easily.

Finally, the book will take readers through Puppet and its companion tools such as Facter, Hiera, and R10k and how to make use of tool chains.

What you will learn

• Understand declarative configuration management
• Make use of GIT-based deployment workflows
• Extend Factor with secure elements
• Create modular and reusable Puppet code
• Extend your code base with publicly available Puppet modules
• Separate logic from data by using Hiera
• Understand and develop Puppet Roles and Profiles

About the Author

Martin Alfke is the co-founder and CEO of example42 GmbH. He has been a Puppet and automation enthusiast since 2007 and has delivered the official Puppet training in Germany since 2011. In the past, he would have said that he is a "System Administrator." Nowadays he prefers the term "Infrastructure Engineer." The big difference is that System Administrators SSH into systems, whereas Infrastructure Engineers fix their automation.

With example42 GmbH Martin supports Puppet Inc as Puppet Service Delivery Partner. He likes giving talks and workshops at conferences around the Globe.

Felix Frank has used and programmed computers for most of his life. During and after working on his computer science diploma, he gained experience on the job as a systems administrator, server operator, and open source software developer. He spent 6 years of his 11-year career as a Puppet power user. In parallel, he spent about two years intensifying his studies through ongoing source code contributions and active participation in several conferences.

Table of Contents

1. Writing Your First Module
2. Puppet Server and Agents
3. A Peek into the Ruby part of Puppet - Facter, Types, Provider
4. Modularising Manifests with Classes and Defined Types
5. Extending your Puppet Infrastructure with Modules
6. The Puppet Beginners ‘Advanced’ parts
7. Puppet Roles and Profiles
8. Separation of Code and Data with Hiera
9. Puppet Code Deployment with R10k