What is Puppet? Components and Writing Manifests

Think about a system administrator managing many servers. They can readily resolve any problems that may arise with one of the servers. But when several servers are unavailable, the situation gets severe.

Puppet can be useful here.

Using Puppet problematic servers can be deployed with ease. All servers are instantly reset to their original desired settings after the code has executed.

The following subjects are covered in this puppet article

• Describe Puppet.

• Puppet's components

• Puppet's workings

• Businesses use Puppet Writing Puppet manifests

Describe Puppet

The configuration management tool puppet makes sure that all systems are set to a desirable and predictable state.

Puppet can automatically install applications on the system; thus, you may use it as a deployment tool as well. Puppet provides infrastructure as code, enabling testing of the environment and precise deployment.

Let's learn about Puppet's components after discussing what Puppet is.

Puppet’s Components

The core server environment (shown above) and the client environment make up the Puppet environment. There is a Puppet master store on the primary server environment where all configuration files are kept.

The actual codes for configuring the clients are manifests.

Code and data are combined in templates to produce the final document.

Files are the static material that customers can download.

Manifests, templates, and files make up modules.

The master may sign the certificates that the client sends, thanks to the certificate authority.

The computer that has to be configured is the Puppet client, which consists of Agent and Factor.

After looking at the parts of a puppet, let's study how a puppet functions in order to better understand what a puppet is.

Puppet’s Architecture

The architecture of Puppet is based on primary-secondary nodes.

The clients are dispersed around the network and interact with the primary-secondary environment, which contains Puppet modules. A certificate with the client agent's ID is sent to the server, which signs it and transmits it back to the client. The connection between the client and the master is made secure and verifiable thanks to this authentication.

The factor then gathers the clients' states and transmits them to the master. The master combines the manifests into the catalogues based on the fact supplied, and an agent executes the manifests on its computer. The catalogues are delivered to the clients. The client creates a report that details any modifications performed and sends it to the master.

Business Using Puppet

Knowing about the businesses that use Puppet to manage their infrastructure will increase your interest in learning more about it. Some of them consist of

• Spotify

• Google

• AT&T

• Staples

• AON

• The American Air Force

These firms have embraced Puppet for varieties of reasons. For instance, Staples employed Puppet as a configuration management solution to automate its IT operations and administration of its private cloud to ensure consistency, giving its IT employees more time to innovate.

Writing Manifests in Puppet

Manifests are files that are written for node configuration and are assembled into catalogues that are run at the client. Each manifest has a. pp extension and is authored in the Ruby programming language.

There are five essential steps to writing a manifest.

The system administrator creates manifest files.

• Compile − Catalogs are created by combining manifests.

• Deploy − The clients receive catalogues.

• Execute − The agent runs catalogues on the client.

• Clients are set up to the desired condition at the conclusion.

Every manifest must follow the same syntax

Firstpuppet { ‘title’ :
Attribute_name1 => attribute_value
Attribute_name2 => attribute_value }

In this case, the first puppet can be a service, a package, or both.

The first puppet's name is referred to as its "title. “The feature that needs to have its value altered or set is called Attribute name1 (for example: IP, ensure).

attribute value - This is the attribute's new value (for example: present, start)

There can be several resource kinds in a manifest. All clients who use the manifest are affected by the term "default."

For instance −

default node
'/etc/sample' file:
This is an example manifest, says the content.
}
service called "httpd"
guarantee => installed
}
}

The path to our first puppet is /etc/sample.

The file is updated with the requested content. If the file doesn't already exist, it is initially created. The Apache service, which will be set up on the client node, is the following resource. On the client computer, the manifest is deployed. The Apache server will be installed, and the client now has a file named "sample" within the "etc." subdirectory.

Lifecycle of Puppet Releases

Puppet open source offers two release paths

• Update schedule − Puppet versions that are not linked to a PE version receive minor (or "y") updates once a month on average. Releases on this track often do not get patch (or "z") releases, although they do contain fixes and new features. This track's updates override any earlier minor releases.

• Long term release − releases Patch (or "z") releases for Puppet versions connected with Puppet Enterprise LTS (long-term support) releases occur about quarterly. Each version does not include new features but instead includes security and bug patches from previous developmental releases.

Use Cases of Puppet

The following use cases may be automated with the help of Puppet Forge's built-in modules and code samples

• Basic set up of the system. Including services, firewalls, NTP, and the registry

• Control the web servers. including IIS, nginx, tomcat, Apache, and

• Source supervision Including Gitlab Monitoring and GitHub. among them are Splunk, Nagios, Zabbix, Sensu, Prometheus, New Relic, Icinga, and SNMP

• Patch administration. Enterprise Linux, Debian, SLES, Ubuntu, and Windows

• Package management for OS patches.

  • Linux − Native package managers directly integrate with puppets

  • Windows − Integrate with Chocolatey Containers and cloud native, or use Puppet to install applications natively on Windows. including Terraform, OpenShift, Docker, and Kubernetes

• Containers and native cloud. Together with Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, and OpenShift

Conclusion

In this article, we have examined a wide range of Puppet. We also observed Puppet's essential elements and every puppet-related application case.