A small talk on Puppet, which I gave to my team at Adobe.

1. puppet
An introduction

2. My Puppet experience
• At Syncapse, migrated from AWS to company
owned DC. Wrote puppet 2 code for whole infra.
o Hadoop and Hbase cluster
o Python based data pipeline machines
o Tomcat based web servers
o Apache web servers
• At SlideShare, worked on migration from puppet 2
to puppet 3 (dc movement and RHEL upgrade)
o rsnapshot module
o solr module
o Using various modules from puppetlabs e.g. haproxy, system etc.

3. What this Session will
cover ?
• How Puppet works
• Puppet Terminologies
• Relationships and Ordering
• Puppet modules
• Hands on
• Understand Hiera
• Provision a node as webserver
• Provision a node as database server
• Go through dummy module code
• Add one level of hierarchy in hiera

4. How puppet works ?

5. Puppet Terminologies
Catalog
A document that describes the desired system state for one specific machine.

6. Puppet Terminologies
Facts
Facter is a cross platform Ruby library designed to gather information on puppet nodes.
[root@puppetnode ~]# facter -y
---
macaddress_eth0: "08:00:27:62:B9:AD"
blockdevice_sda_vendor: ATA
operatingsystem: CentOS
rubyversion: "1.8.7"
is_virtual: "true"
productname: VirtualBox
swapfree: "3.94 GB"
hardwareisa: x86_64
id: root
kernelmajversion: "2.6"
interfaces: "eth0,eth1,lo"
swapsize_mb: "4031.99"
uuid: "78347BE7-62D1-4ECF-BD30-2159CF8FDA3C"
netmask: "255.255.255.0"
swapsize: "3.94 GB"
bios_release_date: "12/01/2006"
processor0: "Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3520M CPU @ 2.90GHz"
uniqueid: "1cac0580"

7. Puppet Terminologies
Resources
type { ‘title’:
attribute => value,
}
file { ‘/etc/password’:
ensure => file,
owner => ‘root’,
group => ‘root’,
mode => ‘0600’,
}
puppet resource user root
Classes
Group of resouces can be organised in classes.
Nodes
Classes get applied to nodes.
# /etc/puppet/manifests/site.pp
node ‘test.corp.adobe.com {
include common
include apache
include squid
}

8. Relationships and
Ordering
• Order of resources in Puppet does not matter.
Puppet manages resources in most efficient way
• If some resources are to be managed in specific
order, declare relationships :
package { ‘openssh-server’:
ensure => exists,
before => File[‘/etc/ssh/sshd_config’]
}
OR
file { ‘/etc/ssh/sshd_config’:
ensure => file,
mode => 0600,
source => ‘puppet:///modules/sshd/sshd_config’,
require => Package[‘openssh-server’]
}
notify, subscribe, chaining arrows (-> and ~>)

9. Puppet Modules
puppet module install puppetlabs-apache
puppet module generate author-mode_name

10. Hands on
• Go through hiera.yaml
• Provision a node with role webserver
• Provision a node with role dbserver
• Add one level in hierarchy in hiera.yaml
• Go through puppet module structure

11. Advanced Topics
• Virtual Resources – declare somewhere and realize
anywhere, any number of times
• Exported Resources – allow nodes to share
information
• PuppetDB – stores catalogs and facts of all the
nodes.
• MCollective – framework for orchestration and
parallel job execution

12. Useful resouces
• Puppet language
o http://docs.puppetlabs.com/puppet/3.8/reference/lang_visual_index.html
• Writing Puppet modules
o https://blog.mozilla.org/it/2013/01/30/liveblog-how-to-use-puppet-like-an-adult/
• Hiera
o http://docs.puppetlabs.com/hiera/1/index.html
• Tutorials
o http://www.example42.com/tutorials/PuppetTutorial
o http://pivotallabs.com/spinning-useful-vms-quickly-vagrant-puppet-puppet-forge/