Puppet Best Practices: Design Patterns for Maintainable Code

by Chris Barbour, Jo Rhett

If you maintain or plan to build Puppet infrastructure, this practical guide will take you a critical step further with best practices for managing the task successfully. Authors Chris Barbour and Jo Rhett present best-in-class design patterns for deploying Puppet environments and discuss the impact of each. The conceptual designs and implementation patterns in this book will help you create solutions that are easy to extend, maintain, and support.

Essential for companies upgrading their Puppet deployments, this book teaches you powerful new features and implementation models that weren't available in the older versions. DevOps engineers will learn how best to deploy Puppet with long-term maintenance and future growth in mind.


Explore Puppet's design philosophy and data structures
Get best practices for using Puppet's declarative language
Examine Puppet resources in depth--the building blocks of state management
Learn to model and describe business and site-specific logic in Puppet
See best-in-class models for multitiered data management with Hiera
Explore available options and community experience for node classification
Utilize r10k to simplify and accelerate Puppet change management
Review the cost benefits of creating your own extensions to Puppet
Get detailed advice for extending Puppet in a maintainable manner

305 pages, Paperback

First published December 25, 2015

Reviews

[Pierfrancesco Aiello · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading it with already some experience in Puppet and declarative languages.

It explain things nicely. Sure it may not cover everything (which book does), but it is really neat and the approach is timeless, it is not really bound to a puppet version.

[Joshua Dewald · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really good overview or the Puppet landscape and best practices. Excellent pointers to dig deeper on topics such as custom types.