Puppet Tutorial

Puppet is an open-source DevOps system management tool. It is used to centralize and automate the configuration management procedure. This tool is developed using Ruby DSL (domain-specific language). Puppet tool deploys, configures, and manages the servers.

This tutorial will help in understanding why Puppet is so popular and what makes it unique when compared to other configuration management tools. All the examples in this tutorial are tested. This code can be used with any puppet configuration by changing the current defined names and variables.

What is Puppet?

• Puppet is a DevOps configuration management tool. This is developed by Puppet Labs and is available for both open-source and enterprise versions. It is used to centralize and automate the procedure of configuration management.
• This tool is developed using Ruby DSL (domain-specific language), which allows you to change a complete infrastructure in code format and can be easily managed and configured.
• Puppet tool deploys, configures, and manages the servers. This is used particularly for the automation of hybrid infrastructure delivery and management.
• With the help of automation, Puppet enables system administrators to operate easier and faster.
• Puppet can also be used as a deployment tool as it can deploy software on the system automatically. Puppet implements infrastructure as a code, which means that you can test the environment for accurate deployment.
• uppet supports many platforms such as Microsoft Windows, Debian/Ubuntu, Red Hat/CentOS/Fedora, MacOS X, etc.
• Puppet uses the client-server paradigm, where one system in any cluster works as the server, called the puppet master, and other works as a client on nodes called a slave.

Features of Puppet

Following are the features of Puppet:

Platform Support

Puppet is compatible with all platforms that support Ruby, like Microsoft Windows, Linux, MacOS X, etc.

Scalable

The puppet was developed in 2005; therefore, many different organizations, including medium and large, have deployed Puppet, and hence its scalability is very large.

Documentation

Puppet provides a large number of well-developed wiki pages with detailed documentation.

Idempotency

Unlike other configuration management tools, in Puppet, we can safely run the same set of configurations multiple times on the same machine. Means, after deploying a configuration on any machine, the puppet keeps verifying those configurations in certain intervals.

Open-Source

A puppet is an open-source tool, and because of this feature, it is easy to extend it to build custom libraries and modules.

Reporting Compliance

The enterprise version of the puppet supports graphical reporting with the help of this you can simply visualize the infrastructure, communicate, and quickly respond to the modifications. It provides you the real-time visibility into the effects of changes, which allows you to see what's going on your infrastructure.

Cost-Effective

When you have many numbers of systems and want to make some minor code changes, then Puppet helps to reduce the effort and cost.

Faster

Puppet allows DevOps professionals and System Administrators to work more quickly and effectively.

Growing Fast

Today, many companies have adopted puppet to manage their infrastructure, such as Google, Red Hat, AT&T, Spotify, AON, US Air Force, etc.

Prerequisites

Before proceeding with this tutorial, you should have a basic knowledge of system administration, network protocol communication, and infrastructure. To automate the infrastructure provisioning, we should have a basic understanding of Ruby scripts and the system where we want to use Puppet.

Audience

This tutorial is created for those who would like to learn the basics of Puppet. This tutorial will provide enough understanding to reduce the complexity of managing infrastructure.

After completion of this tutorial, you will get a basic level of understanding of Puppet and workflow. This tutorial will also give you a good understanding of the configuration of Puppet in a preconfigured infrastructure and how to use it for automation.

Problems

We assure you that you will not find any difficulty while learning our Puppet tutorial. But if there is any mistake in this tutorial, kindly post the problem or error in the contact form so that we can improve it.