Learning Puppet 4

Chapter 19. Preparing for a Puppet Server

Before we start building a Puppet server, we’ll stop to review some essential considerations:

• Why a Puppet server changes the catalog build process
• How to build a Puppet server that will be easy to move or upgrade
• Whether to use Puppet master or Puppet Server with your nodes

Understanding these important details will save unnecessary and time-consuming rebuilds later.

Understanding the Catalog Builder

To properly explain the functionality provided by a server for Puppet nodes, we’ll start by reviewing what we have previously covered about how Puppet builds the resource catalog.

Node

A node is a discrete system that could be managed by a Puppet agent. You can probably name the conventional node types quickly:

• A physical computer system, like an Oracle Sun X5-4 or Dell PowerEdge R720
• A virtualized operating system, like RedHat Enterprise Linux, running on an VMWare ESX or OpenStack instance
• A virtualized operating system running on a public cloud provider like Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Google Compute.

There are a large number of nodes that can run Puppet agents you might not be aware of. Here’s a short but incomplete list of unconventional node types:

• Routers, switches, and VPN concentrators supplied by Juniper, Cisco, Arista, and other network device vendors come with integrated Puppet agents.
• Virtualization platforms like OpenStack can use Puppet agent to configure and manage the hypervisor.
• Container technologies like Docker ...