Orchestrating Puppet, tasks, and plans

Puppet orchestrator is an effective tool for making on-demand changes to your infrastructure.

With orchestrator you can:

• Automate tasks and plans tasks to eliminate manual work across your infrastructure and applications.

• Initiate Puppet jobs whenever you need to update agents.

• Group the servers in your network according to immediate business needs. By leveraging orchestrator with PuppetDB, which stores detailed information about your nodes, you can search and filter servers based on metadata. No static lists of hosts, no reliance on complicated host-naming conventions.

• Connect with thousands of hosts at the same time without slowing down your network. The Puppet Communications Protocol (PCP) and message broker efficiently mediate communications on your network even as your operational demands grow.

• Distribute the Puppet agent workload by adding masters that are dedicated to catalog compilation as you increase in scale. Compilers efficiently process requests and compile code for environments that have thousands of nodes. For more information, see Installing compilers.

• Take advantage of the tasks installed with PE. Use the package task to inspect, install, upgrade, and manage packages or the service task to start, stop, restart, and check the status of services running on your systems. Additional tasks are available from the Puppet Forge.

• Write your own tasks in any programming language that your target nodes can run, such as Bash, PowerShell, or Python.

• Write plans in Puppet or YAML or download them from the Forge.

• Integrate server logging, auditing, and per node role-based access control (RBAC).

• Use plans to create customized permissions for tasks.