What this book covers

Chapter 1, Puppet Essentials, is an intense and condensed summary of the most important Puppet concepts: 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, Hiera, is dedicated to how to manage our data with Hiera: how to define the lookup hierarchy, organize data, and use different backends.

Chapter 3, 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 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, Deploying and Migrating Puppet, 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 it is written in an editor to its management with an SCM, its testing and deployment to production.

Chapter 9, Scaling Puppet Infrastructures, covers the challenges you might face in growing infrastructures and how it is possible to make Puppet scale with them.

Chapter 10, Writing Puppet Plugins, covers the many available possibilities to extend the core code with custom plugins and gives a deeper view on how Puppet internals are organized.

Chapter 11, Beyond the System, takes a journey outside the traditional territories, exploring how we can manage with Puppet network and storage equipment and cloud instances.

Chapter 12, Future Puppet, is a step towards Puppet 4 and how its new features may influence the way we work with Puppet.