Use cases

Exported resources are best used delicately within an infrastructure. We'll go over a few use cases, and talk about similar applications that may use this information as we go. We'll use Forge modules where they make sense, but we'll also build some custom exported resources so that a functional sample is available. In this section, we'll be discussing a few examples of exported resources:

• A dynamic /etc/hosts file
• Adding a node to an haproxy load balancer
• Building an external database on a database server for an application server
• Custom configuration files using the concat and File_line Puppet resources

 

 

Hosts file

This first sample is easy to understand and interpret, but definitely should not be used in place of a true Domain Name Server (DNS). A few years ago, I had a customer that was using a public cloud, but it had been acquired by a very large company, which had a team dedicated to managing corporate DNS. The turnaround for a DNS record was often 4 days, while many of the applications...