Summary

In this chapter, we introduced the basic idea of cloud computing, and looked at some options for managing cloud resources, including CloudFormation and Terraform, before meeting the puppetlabs/aws module.

We worked through the process of creating an AWS account, setting up an IAM user and policy, generating credentials and SSH keys, installing the AWS SDK gem, and choosing a suitable AMI.

Using Puppet, we created an EC2 instance and security group, and saw how to connect to the running instance with SSH. Furthermore, we created a whole VPC from scratch, complete with subnets, Internet gateway, route table, security group, and EC2 instance.

Lastly, we saw how to build all these cloud resources directly from Hiera data, which is the most flexible and powerful way to describe Puppet resources.

In the next and final chapter we'll draw together ideas and techniques from all the previous chapters in this book, to create a complete, working example Puppet infrastructure, which you can use as...