Puppet Best Practices ─ Design Patterns for Maintainable Code

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

Chris Barbour is a Practice Leader at Taos Mountain, Inc. He specializes in IT automation and large scale infrastructure, an has been working with configuration management solutions in various forms since 2008. Chris has maintained and deployed a mix of Puppet and Puppet Enterprise in a number of large scale multi-platform environments. In addition to his operational responsibilities, he provides training and professional guidance for consultants looking to learn Puppet or otherwise further their IT careers. Chris lives in the heart of Silicon Valley with his wife and son, and in his free time enjoys motorcycling, photography, and travel.