How far should I go with puppet?

Question

I'd like to preface by saying I'm new to puppet. I have been working with it via vagrant and am starting to feel comfortable writing manifests, but I lack perhaps the experience, or intuition, that can answer my question.

I am trying to grasp how puppet is scoped, and where lines are drawn. I am specifically interested in how this applies to modules and their creation and use.

A more concrete example: the puppletlabs-nginx module. So hypothetically I'm going along my merry way, creating a manifest for a given server role; say it's a dead-simple static file webserver, and I'd like to use nginx. The module will clearly help me with that; there's try_files support and such. I can even ramp up to reverse-proxying via this module. But what if things get stickier? What if there's something I want to do programmatically that I cannot do with the module?

Well, perhaps the short answer is to fix it myself, do a pull request, and go along my merry way. But where does that stop? Is the goal of a community puppet module to support every facet of a given software package? That seems unmanageable. On the other hand, doesn't that create a bunch of mostly-baked modules, build solely from use cases?

Then, there's an analog to Android UI: there are setter methods for what I think is most XML UI definitions. In puppet if feels similar. You can build a config file programmatically, or create it by filling in an ERB template. In other words, I feel the line in puppet between programmatic creation of configuration files and the templated creation of configuration files is blurred; I found no best way with Android and so I don't know which is the way to go with puppet.

So, to the question: what constitutes the ideal puppet module? Should it rely more on templates? On the manifest? Should it account for all configuration scenarios?

From a further-withdrawn perspective it almost seems I want something more opinionated. Puppet's power seems to be flexibility and abstraction, but the modules that are out there feel inconsistent and not as fleshed out.

Thanks for reading...

Answer 1

Thanks to Mark. In just a small amount of time I've switched over to playing with Chef and the modules seem better in regards to many of the concerns I voiced.