Recently, my team rewrote all Puppet manifests for Mayflower’s core infrastructure with our two year long Puppet experience in mind. Many mistakes were made in the past, but this time we decided to write clean and structured Puppet code based on the latest language features from Puppet 3. More blog posts about advanced Puppet topics are going to be published in 2014.

The main theme of the rewrite was abstraction. Our goal was to use as many third-party modules as possible. Because many modules needed fixes, we contributed a lot of code back to the community. We adopted the Roles, Profiles, Components Design and use Hiera extensively to separate business logic, modules, manifests and data. Our manifests basically glue the modules together and embed them sensibly in our environment, seeded with data from Hiera.

The Problem

If you’ve written your fair share of Puppet manifests, you can imagine that such an architecture requires the definition and inclusion of lots of classes. Sadly, Puppet’s dependency system treats classes different than resources: If you include class foo in class bar, then class foo and all its contained resources and dependencies won’t have any dependency relations with class bar. Weiterlesen →