Preface

The complexity of your installation will increase with the number of nodes in your organization. Working on a small deployment with a few developers is much simpler than working on a large installation with many developers.

Mastering Puppet Second Edition deals with the issues faced by larger deployments, such as scaling and versioning. This book will show you how to fit Puppet into your organization and keep everyone working. The concepts presented can be adopted to suit any size organization.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Dealing with Load/Scale, will show you how to scale your Puppet infrastructure as your node count increases.

Chapter 2, Organizing Your Nodes and Data, is where we show different methods of applying modules to nodes. We look at Hiera and external node classifiers (ENCs).

Chapter 3, Git and Environments, introduces Git and how to use Git as an integral component of your Puppet infrastructure.

Chapter 4, Public Modules, shows how to use Puppet Forge as a source of modules and how to use several popular modules in your organization.

Chapter 5, Custom Facts and Modules, is where we extend Puppet with custom facts and start writing our own modules.

Chapter 6, Custom Types, is where we introduce defined types and show how to extend the Puppet language with our own custom types and providers.

Chapter 7, Reporting and Orchestration, is where we configure reporting to help track down errors in our Puppet deployments.

Chapter 8, Exported Resources, explains how useful it is to have resources on one node that can be applied to other nodes in your organization.

Chapter 9, Roles and Profiles, shows a popular design pattern in Puppet node deployments. Here we present the concept and show example usage.

Chapter 10, Troubleshooting, is where we show some common errors found in Puppet deployments, as well as possible solutions.

What you need for this book

All the examples in this book were written and tested using an Enterprise Linux 7 derived installation, such as CentOS 7, Scientific Linux 7, or Springdale Linux 7. Additional repositories used were EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux), the Software Collections (SCL) repository, the Foreman repository, and the Puppet Labs repository. The version of Puppet used was the latest 4.2 series at the time of writing.

Who this book is for

This book is for those who have intermediate knowledge of Puppet and are looking to deploy it in their environment. Some idea of how to write simple modules for configuration management with Puppet is a prerequisite for this book.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Now sign the certificate using the puppet cert sign command."

A block of code is set as follows:

yumrepo { 'example.com-puppet':
  baseurl  => 'http://puppet.example.com/noarch',
  descr    => 'example.com Puppet Code Repository',
  enabled  => '1',
  gpgcheck => '0',
}

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

node_terminus = ldap
ldapserver = ldap.example.com
ldapbase = ou=hosts,dc=example,dc=com

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

# puppetserver gem install jruby-ldap

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "You can also navigate to the Monitor | Reports section to see the latest reports."

Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Tip

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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