Puppet Best Practices: Design Patterns for Maintainable Code

by Chris Barbour, Jo Rhett

If you're already up to speed on Puppet and know how to write a basic module, this practical book takes you a critical step further with best practices for building out your Puppet infrastructure. You'll learn how to avoid pitfalls that often leave many teams struggling to maintain what they already have.

Ideal for DevOps engineers--and written to cover the upcoming Puppet 4 release--this book shows you how best to deploy Puppet with long-term maintenance and future growth in mind. This book clearly picks up where other Puppet resources leave off.


Leverage the main components of Puppet, including Hiera, roles and profiles, site.pp, modules, and external node classifiers
Explore the purpose of each Puppet component and understand how it fits into the bigger picture
Avoid common ways that Puppet components are abused
Build a release management and deployment process using Git and R10k
Learn about module design patterns, as well as sub-classes, resource relationships, containment, defined types, and scope
Apply development best practices, including the Single Responsibility Principle, Don't Repeat Yourself, and Separation of Concerns

308 pages, ebook

First published December 25, 2015

Reviews

[P A · 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.