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Puppet 4 Essentials, Second Edition
Puppet 4 Essentials, Second Edition

Puppet 4 Essentials, Second Edition: Acquire skills to manage your IT infrastructure effectively with Puppet , Second Edition

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Profile Icon Felix Frank Profile Icon Martin Alfke
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Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Half star icon Empty star icon 3.7 (6 Ratings)
Paperback Dec 2015 246 pages 2nd Edition
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Arrow left icon
Profile Icon Felix Frank Profile Icon Martin Alfke
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Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Half star icon Empty star icon 3.7 (6 Ratings)
Paperback Dec 2015 246 pages 2nd Edition
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Puppet 4 Essentials, Second Edition

Chapter 2. The Master and Its Agents

So far, you have dealt with some concise Puppet manifests that were built to model some very specific goals. By means of the puppet apply command, you can use such snippets on any machine in your infrastructure. This is not the most common way of using Puppet though, and this chapter will introduce you to the popular master/agent structure. It's worth noting, however, that applying standalone manifests can always be useful, which are independent of your overall Puppet design.

Under the master/agent paradigm, you will typically install the Puppet agent software on all nodes under your care and make them call the master, which is yet another Puppet installation. The master will compile the appropriate manifests and effectively remotely control the agents. Both the agent and the master authenticate themselves using trusted SSL certificates.

This chapter covers the following topics:

  • The Puppet master
  • Setting up the Puppet Agent
  • Performance considerations...

The Puppet Master

Many Puppet-based workflows are centered on the master, which is the central source of configuration data and authority. The master hands instructions to all the computer systems in the infrastructure (where agents are installed). It serves multiple purposes in the distributed system of Puppet components.

The master will perform the following tasks:

  • Storing and compiling manifests
  • Serving as the SSL certification authority
  • Processing reports from the agent machines
  • Gathering and storing information about the agents

As such, the security of your master machine is paramount. The requirements for hardening are comparable to those of a Kerberos Key Distribution Center.

During its first initialization, the Puppet master generates the CA certificate. This self-signed certificate will be distributed among and trusted by all the components of your infrastructure. This is why its private key must be protected very carefully. New agent machines request individual certificates, which are...

Setting up the Puppet Agent

As was explained earlier, the master mainly serves instructions to agents in the form of catalogs that are compiled from the manifest. You have also prepared a node block for your first agent in the master manifest.

Installing the agent software is easy—you did this at the start of Chapter 1, Writing Your First Manifests. The plain Puppet package that allows you to apply a local manifest contains all the required parts in order to operate a proper agent.

If you are using Puppet Labs packages, use the instructions from earlier in this chapter. On agent machines, you need not install the puppetserver package. Just get puppet-agent instead.

After a successful package installation, the following invocation is sufficient for an initial test:

root@agent# puppet agent --test
Info: Creating a new SSL key for agent
Error: Could not request certificate: getaddrinfo: Name or service not known
Exiting; failed to retrieve certificate and waitforcert is disabled

Puppet first...

Performance considerations

Operating a Puppet master gives you numerous benefits over just using puppet apply on all your machines. This comes at a cost, of course. The master and agents form a server/client relation, and as with most such constructs, the server can become the bottleneck.

The good news is that the Puppet agent is a fat client. The major share of the work—inspecting file contents, interfacing with the package-management subsystem, services subsystem, and much more—is done by the agent. The master only has to compile manifests and build catalogs from them. This becomes increasingly complex as you hand over more control to Puppet.

There is one more task your master is responsible for. Many of your manifests will contain file resources that rely on prepared content:

file { '/usr/local/etc/my_app.ini':
  ensure => file,
  owner  => 'root',
  group  => 'root',
  source => 'puppet:///modules/my_app/usr/local/etc/my_app...

Using Phusion Passenger with Nginx

Some operators don't like running important services in the Java Virtual Machine, for various reasons, such as its memory requirements. As of Puppet 4, alternatives to puppetserver are still available, so the requirement can be avoided.

The best way to run the master without the JVM is a web server with a support for Passenger. In this context, the Puppet master runs as a Rack application. The most common setup comprises the Apache web server and mod_passenger. Setting this up is quite straightforward and documentation is plentiful. We will therefore, concentrate on an attractive alternative.

Unfortunately, the Puppet 4 package cannot be made to work with Passenger easily. The best way to achieve this was a manual Puppet installation from the source, at the time of writing this. With Puppet 3.x, Passenger was the default for a long time, and making it work with Nginx is quite simple with the following instructions.

Note

Please note that in Puppet 4, the...

Completing the stack with PuppetDB

Whether you choose to use puppetserver or prefer Passenger after all, there is yet another piece of infrastructure that should be considered for each master host. PuppetDB is a specialized database designed to interact with the Puppet master. It mainly comprises a PostgreSQL backend with an API wrapper. The latter was written in Clojure and runs in yet another JVM.

PuppetDB aids the master's secondary task of storing reports and other agent data. It is also necessary for some specific manifest compiler functionality. This is covered in Chapter 6, Leveraging the Full Toolset of the Language.

The best way to set up and configure PuppetDB is actually Puppet itself. Since the necessary tools have not yet been introduced, we will postpone this step until Chapter 6, Leveraging the Full Toolset of the Language. This is not a problem, because PuppetDB is not essential for basic master operation.

Note

Nevertheless, after finishing this title, you should include...

The Puppet Master


Many Puppet-based workflows are centered on the master, which is the central source of configuration data and authority. The master hands instructions to all the computer systems in the infrastructure (where agents are installed). It serves multiple purposes in the distributed system of Puppet components.

The master will perform the following tasks:

  • Storing and compiling manifests

  • Serving as the SSL certification authority

  • Processing reports from the agent machines

  • Gathering and storing information about the agents

As such, the security of your master machine is paramount. The requirements for hardening are comparable to those of a Kerberos Key Distribution Center.

During its first initialization, the Puppet master generates the CA certificate. This self-signed certificate will be distributed among and trusted by all the components of your infrastructure. This is why its private key must be protected very carefully. New agent machines request individual certificates, which are...

Setting up the Puppet Agent


As was explained earlier, the master mainly serves instructions to agents in the form of catalogs that are compiled from the manifest. You have also prepared a node block for your first agent in the master manifest.

Installing the agent software is easy—you did this at the start of Chapter 1, Writing Your First Manifests. The plain Puppet package that allows you to apply a local manifest contains all the required parts in order to operate a proper agent.

If you are using Puppet Labs packages, use the instructions from earlier in this chapter. On agent machines, you need not install the puppetserver package. Just get puppet-agent instead.

After a successful package installation, the following invocation is sufficient for an initial test:

root@agent# puppet agent --test
Info: Creating a new SSL key for agent
Error: Could not request certificate: getaddrinfo: Name or service not known
Exiting; failed to retrieve certificate and waitforcert is disabled

Puppet first created...

Left arrow icon Right arrow icon

Key benefits

  • Breeze through Puppet 4’s key features and performance improvements to bring real advantage to your IT infrastructure
  • Discover Puppet best practices to help you avoid common mistakes and pitfalls
  • Blitz through easy-to-follow examples to get to grips with Puppet and succeed with everyday IT automation

Description

Puppet is a configuration management tool that allows you to automate all your IT configurations, giving you control over what you do to each Puppet Agent in a network, and when and how you do it. In this age of digital delivery and ubiquitous Internet presence, it's becoming increasingly important to implement scalable and portable solutions, not only in terms of software, but also the systems that run it. The free Ruby-based tool Puppet has established itself as the most successful solution to manage any IT infrastructure. Ranging from local development environments through complex data center setups to scalable cloud implementations, Puppet allows you to handle them all with a unified approach. Puppet 4 Essentials, Second Edition gets you started rapidly and intuitively as you’ll put Puppet’s tools to work right away. It will also highlight the changes associated with performance improvements as well as the new language features in Puppet 4. We’ll start with a quick introduction to Puppet to get you managing your IT systems quickly. You will then learn about the Puppet Agent that comes with an all-in-one (AIO) package and can run on multiple systems. Next, we’ll show you the Puppet Server for high-performance communication and passenger packages. As you progress through the book, the innovative structure and approach of Puppet will be explained with powerful use cases. The difficulties that are inherent to a complex and powerful tool will no longer be a problem for you as you discover Puppet's fascinating intricacies. By the end of the book, you will not only know how to use Puppet, but also its companion tools Facter and Hiera, and will be able to leverage the flexibility and expressive power implemented by their tool chain.

Who is this book for?

If you're an experienced IT professional and a new Puppet user, this book will provide you with all you need to know to go from installation to advanced automation in no time at all. Get a rapid introduction to the essential topics and then tackle Puppet for advanced automation.

What you will learn

  • Write and employ individual Puppet manifests
  • Understand how Puppet implements system abstraction
  • Deploy the Puppet master and agents
  • Leverage and extend Facter to summarize your systems
  • Create modular and reusable Puppet code
  • Extend your code base with publicly available Puppet modules
  • Use the modern features of Puppet 4
  • Separate logic from data using Hiera
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Publication date : Dec 11, 2015
Length: 246 pages
Edition : 2nd
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781785881107
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Edition : 2nd
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781785881107
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Table of Contents

9 Chapters
1. Writing Your First Manifests Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
2. The Master and Its Agents Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
3. A Peek under the Hood – Facts, Types, and Providers Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
4. Modularizing Manifests with Classes and Defined Types Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
5. Extending Your Puppet Infrastructure with Modules Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
6. Leveraging the Full Toolset of the Language Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
7. New Features from Puppet 4 Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
8. Separating Data from Code Using Hiera Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Index Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Customer reviews

Top Reviews
Rating distribution
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Half star icon Empty star icon 3.7
(6 Ratings)
5 star 50%
4 star 16.7%
3 star 0%
2 star 16.7%
1 star 16.7%
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Rudy Jan 08, 2016
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
Whether you are new to Puppet or a long time Puppet user Felix and Martin have written a superb manual that DOES cover the essentials needed to get going with Puppet 4. Coming from Puppet 2 and 3, I definitely appreciate their coverage of upgrading to Puppet 4 along with the breaking of old habits like strict variable naming, and learning the new reference syntax. Their coverage of Facts, Types, and Providers is very thorough and there are other nuggets like how to override resource parameters. Definite buy, you won't be disappointed!!!
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Chris Everett Mar 31, 2016
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
Puppet 4 Essentials, Second Edition gets you started rapidly. The book also highlights the changes associated with performance improvements as well as the new language features in Puppet 4. The Puppet Agent that comes with an all-in-one (AIO) package and can run on multiple systems was a clincher for me. I will most definitely recommend this book.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Sussane Miller Mar 31, 2016
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
The book is very detailed and easy to read, it takes the reader through the different facilities Puppet provides, logging, metrics and reporting, with examples how to implement simple but at the same time powerful processors and integrate them with a wide range of tools, like monitoring, metrics, etc. Overall, I would highly recommend this book.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Andrea Jan 31, 2016
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon 4
This is the second edition, but it's not clear how the first edition (that I've not read) it's necessary.You will start from writing your first manifest, without any background knowledge of what is Puppet and it's architecture. Maybe was already covered in the previous edition, but in my opinion a short introduction was useful.Compared to other "essential" books this required some initial knowledge, otherwise it's too difficult to learn. Definitely not for beginners.Anyway the examples are clear enough and chapter by chapter you learn more and more.New features of Puppet 4 are covered in chapter 6.A good reference, maybe without a clear path on how use Puppet, but deep enough.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Amazon Customer Feb 23, 2017
Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 2
It's starts great and then it just lost me. A bit disappointed.I found the free training given by puppetlabs was much more helpful. Also their puppet vm environment with the quests was excellent (also free)
Amazon Verified review Amazon
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