Puppet 4: Hiera, the Single Source of Truth

Course Overview
Hi everyone, and welcome. My name is Andrew Mallett and you might know me as the @urbanpenguin. I certainly hope you're going to be ready for the fourth Puppet course, yes, the fourth Puppet course in this series, Puppet 4: Hiera, the Single Source of Truth. Now we dramatically call it the Single Source of Truth, because Hiera is the one place Puppet can rely on for its configuration data. Now you might know that I work within the U. K. in my own Linux training and consultancy company. Puppet has always been my configuration tool of choice, and I started using it maybe seven or eight years ago to help complete classroom setups, and I'm still using it today. In this course, we're going to be refactoring that NTP module that we've been working on, and we're going to make sure that it can utilize Hiera in replacement of some of the Puppet logic that we've previously added. This is going to make our code simpler and easier to maintain in the long run, as configuration values are retrieved from Hiera. During the course, we're going to dive straight into writing YAML files, looking at how we can configure and test Hiera, as well as fault finding our Puppet applications. By the end of this course, you're going to be able to create Puppet modules, delivering configurations that are customized using Hiera. The modules are going to be easy to maintain with simplicity at the heart of their design. Now of course, you're going to need some basic knowledge of Linux and an understanding of Puppet. This can be gained from the Puppet 4: Language Essentials course.

Refactoring the NTP Module for Hiera
Hello and welcome to this Pluralsight presentation. My name is Andrew Mallett and I'm here as your instructor to help guide you through the final module of this course where we take a look at refactoring the NTP module for Hiera. Now as we go through and take a look at the objectives for this course, we're not going to find too many objectives here. Quite simply we are going to be working with our existing NTP module, and we're going to be looking at how we can simplify the code, making use of Hiera. Now this is really necessary, because as we've been going through the different elements of this Puppet series, we've been building in an element of complexity. Well now, we're going to be removing some of that complexity. As we demonstrate different elements of the Puppet language, we've been using this NTP module to be able to show those elements. Well the reality is, we've probably made it a little bit more complex than it really needs, so now we're going to be looking at tidying it all up and really simplifying it by making use of Hiera. So the first thing that we're going to see is working at the command line of my CentOS host, we're going to start adding in the required keys to the correct data sources within Hiera.