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Puppet Server and 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 server/agent structure. It's worth noting, however, that applying standalone manifests that are independent of your overall Puppet design can always be useful.

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

This chapter...

Key benefits

Breeze through Puppet's key features and performance improvements to bring real advantages to your IT infrastructure

Discover Puppet best practices to help you avoid common mistakes and pitfalls

Examples to help you 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 scaleable and portable solutions, not only in terms of software, but also the system that runs it. This book gets you started quickly with Puppet and its tools in the right way. It highlights improvements in Puppet and provides solutions for upgrading. It starts with a quick introduction to Puppet in order to quickly get your IT automation platform in place. Then you learn about the Puppet Agent and its installation and configuration along with Puppet Server and its scaling options. The book adopts an innovative structure and approach, and Puppet is explained with flexible use cases that empower you to manage complex infrastructures easily. Finally, the book will take readers through Puppet and its companion tools such as Facter, Hiera, and R10k and how to make use of tool chains.

What you will learn

Understand declarative configuration management

Make use of GIT-based deployment workflows

Extend Factor with secure elements

Create modular and reusable Puppet code

Extend your code base with publicly available Puppet modules

Separate logic from data by using Hiera

Understand and develop Puppet Roles and Profiles

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