Extending Puppet - Second Edition

Explore the world of Puppet and harness the possibilities it offers to efficiently manage the configuration of your IT infrastructure

About This Book

• Explore the Puppet ecosystem and learn the concepts and possibilities it offers
• Design and manage your Puppet architecture with the extended functionalities of Puppet
• Write and test reusable and maintainable Puppet code

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

• Absorb 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. To start, you will get familiarized with Hiera and will learn to install and configure it. Then you will discover how to write reusable and maintainable code with Puppet. Furthermore, you will explore the latest features of Puppet 4 and execute, test, and deploy Puppet. As you progress through the chapters, you will get to grips with higher abstraction modules and will the code workflow management.

Finally, we will teach you how to develop plugins for Puppet and show you the best techniques to avoid common errors with the help of practical examples.

Jaime Soriano Pastor was born in Teruel, a small city in Spain. He has always been passionate about technology and sciences. While studying computer science at the university in his hometown, he had his first encounter with free software, which deeply shaped its career. He worked for various companies on different and interesting projects from operative 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 at a well-known technology company.