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Introduction
This article is all you need to get started with Puppet Enterprise and automate your organization.
Puppet Enterprise is the commercial form of Puppet. It is used to manage and configure many servers. This helps to automate the infrastructure of an organization. Puppet is a software configuration management tool. It has a declarative language to manage the settings. It is a platform to configure the system and software settings. You do not need much knowledge of programming to use Puppet.
You must have questions about how Puppet Enterprise makes configuring easier. How does it work? And how to get started with it? By the end of this article, you will get an overview of Puppet Enterprise. And all your questions were answered.
Why do we need such tools?
By definition, Configuration management is defining, controlling, releasing, changing, documenting, and reporting the configuration of items in a system.
In other words, the purpose is to keep track of the configuration of a system through its whole life cycle. The definition is understood but why do you need to keep this track?
In DevOps, you deal with a bunch of servers. To implement changes, manage tasks, keep a check on the system, and add new tasks, you will have to make changes in all these servers which will be time-consuming.
Instead, you can link all the servers to a configuration file, then by changing a few lines of code, you have the result that we need.
The Puppet Enterprise
Puppet Enterprise helps to automate repetitive tasks, provision new systems, deploy critical applications, and manage their infrastructure.
It has all the power and control of Puppet, the original open-source product. It has everything to deliver management capabilities and help you deploy changes within minutes that might take days.
How to get started with Puppet Enterprise?
All you need to get started with Puppet Enterprise is your content and the platform. You fetch your content and upload it to the Puppet Enterprise platform, where it is stored in the control repository. The control repository contains bundles of codes called modules.
Puppet enterprise sets automation footprints from the operating system layer to the networking layer to the middleware layer up to the application layer.
System requirements
A few system requirements you should check before installing are mentioned below:
Hardware requirements The hardware needs are classified into standard, large and extra large. This depends upon the number of nodes to be managed.
Supported operating systems Puppet Enterprise supports various operating systems depending upon the infrastructural needs. The primary server platform supports different OS except for windows. Use Linux machines(or virtual machines) to set up and manage using windows if you are a windows user. The agent platform and tools support different operating systems (almost all major OS).
Supported browsers Puppet Enterprise supports the latest versions of Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge, and Apple Safari(10 or later).
System configuration Nodes and networks should be configured, check timekeeping, name resolutions, and web URLs for management requirements as listed on the Puppet Enterprise platform.
Quick guide
Install Puppet Enterprise You should install the standard version that manages 10-4000 nodes that Puppet offers. Thereafter scale up to large and extra large as your infrastructure grows. The primary server supports limited Operating systems. If you don’t have the required OS, install the server on a virtual machine with ubuntu. The puppet agent and tools (makes managing easier) support a wide variety of OS.
Add nodes to the inventory The inventory contains nodes managed by Puppet Enterprise. There are two types of nodes in the inventory: 1.Agentless nodes(no puppet agent) 2.Agent node(puppet agent installed: easier and recommended).
Add codes to the control repository The control repository is where you store your bundles of codes called modules. Creating the control repository based on the puppet enterprise template. It contains all the necessary files for configuration and helpful code.
Manage apache configuration on targets You deploy and configure nodes by grouping them with the help of the apache module.
Manage IIS configuration on windows target IIS is a module that helps you build your desired infrastructure. You can install this module on the puppet agent.
Some more important steps Check out forge to download the other necessary modules. Learn how to develop high-quality modules, tasks, and plans by exploring the platform.
Puppet Enterprise architecture
Puppet enterprise consists of various components for automating your infrastructure.
It consists of primary servers and compilers, Puppet agents, console services, Code Manager and r10k, orchestration services, and databases. In this section, we’ll learn about each of these in brief.
1. Primary server and compilers
The primary server is the main component of puppet enterprise. It is where all main actions from configuration to management of nodes take place. No other tool in Puppet can function without the infrastructure of your organisation set into the puppet server. This is where you create catalogs that contain the desired infrastructure details. And add codes and verify SSL certificates. You can install other components to enhance the working of the primary server.
NOTE: if you are a windows user, you will have to set up the primary server on an OS that the server supports and then you can manage and configure using Puppet agent and puppet client tools. Every Primary server contains :
Puppet server It hosts API endpoints for certificate verification. Also helps the compiler to compile the catalogs but only for agent nodes.
Catalog compiler Catalog in puppet is the description of the desired state of a node (server). The compiler extracts these catalogs from the server and uses them to configure the nodes.
File sync It picks up codes that need changes and deploys them to the compiler to synchronize. Then deploy it back to the server only when it’s ready.
Certificate authority Must be for the safety of your data. It accepts certificate signing and removal requests from the node and serves certificates to the node.
2. Puppet Agent
You can consider this as a checking system to get the desired state of your infrastructure.
It requests a catalog from the server, then checks each code according to the description in the catalog. The agent makes necessary changes and submits the catalog back to the server.
3. Console services
We will learn about various components of console services:
The console It groups nodes and creates reports to manage and achieve the desired infrastructure. It uses the data in the server to analyze and gives you a summary of what is happening at the current stage.
RBAC Role-based access control is the component of Puppet Enterprise that manages the users and gives access to the data to these users. Puppet has a default permissions grant for tokens(access for users). You can also customize it as well.
Node classifier It groups nodes into different categories and increases efficiency by deploying specific changes on specific groups of nodes. You can also use existing classes from modules on the forge that Puppet provides.
4. Code manager and r10k
These are tools used for managing and deploying code. These are pre-installed with the primary server.
Code manager and r10k are used to add codes to nodes that we keep in Git. They install modules and maintain environments and deploy code to the server. (environments are a branch of codes and commands that are turned into a directory on the server. The server appoints each environment with its own module path. This helps in testing changes before implementing them.)
5. Orchestration services
This allows you to make on-spot demands that only an authenticated token user can demand. All tasks that are required to be executed quickly are implemented using this tool.
As mentioned above, the agentless nodes are controlled by the Agentless Catalog Executor (ACE) service. Orchestral services run the ACE.
6. Puppet Enterprise databases
PostgreSQL is the backend database that Puppet enterprise uses. The picture shows the databases that PostgreSQL consists:
Now it's time to discuss some FAQs related to the Overview of the Puppet Enterprise.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Puppet Enterprise?
Puppet Enterprise is the commercial form of Puppet. It is one of the most used DevOps tools for managing and configuring many servers.
Which is the best configuration management tool?
Puppet Enterprise, Chef, and Ansible are one of the best configuration management tools.
Is Puppet Enterprise better than Chef?
It depends on the domain of work experience of your team. Puppet enterprise is best for you if your team has system administration experience. If your team contains developers, then Chef would work best for you.
What are modules in puppet enterprise?
Modules are collections of code in the puppet enterprise. It consists of files and data. They organize and reuse puppet code by enabling you to split the code into several manifests.
Conclusion
In this article, we discussed what a puppet enterprise is and how it works in brief and how it became an adapted solution across every major industry.
After reading this blog, are you not feeling excited to explore more articles on DevOps? and other configuration tools?
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