What this book covers
Chapter 1, Puppet Essentials, is an intense and condensed summary of the most important Puppet concepts; it acts as the baseline needed to understand the chapters that follow and a good occasion to refresh and maybe enrich knowledge about the Puppet language and model.
Chapter 2, Managing Puppet Data with Hiera, is dedicated to how to manage our data with Hiera, define the lookup hierarchy, organize data, and use different backends.
Chapter 3, Introducing PuppetDB, covers the installation, configuration, and usage of PuppetDB, and explores the great possibilities that it may enable in the next generations of modules.
Chapter 4, Designing Puppet Architectures, outlines the components to manage when defining a Puppet architecture: the available tools, how to integrate them, how to cope with data and code, and how to organize resources to be applied to nodes.
Chapter 5, Using and Writing Reusable Modules, covers the most important Puppet element from the user's perspective: modules and how to write them in order to be able to reuse them in different infrastructures.
Chapter 6, Higher Abstraction Modules, takes a step further and focuses on modules that use different application modules to compose more complex and wider scenarios.
Chapter 7, Puppet Migration Patterns, analyzes the approaches that can be taken when introducing Puppet in a new or existing infrastructure: methodologies, patterns, techniques, and tips for a successful deployment.
Chapter 8, Code Workflow Management, focuses on how to manage Puppet code, from when is written in an editor, to its management with an SCM, its testing and deployment, and into production.
Chapter 9, Scaling Puppet Infrastructures, faces the challenges in growing infrastructures and how it is possible to make Puppet scale with them.
Chapter 10, Extending Puppet, covers the many available possibilities to extend the core code with custom plugins and gives a deeper view of how Puppet's internals are organized.
Chapter 11, Beyond the System, takes a journey outside the traditional territories, exploring how we can manage with the Puppet network, as well as storage equipment and cloud instances.
Chapter 12, Future Puppet, is a step beyond Puppet 4 and how the project may evolve in future versions.
