Puppet users - Feb 2014 - How to group systems using Puppet and hiera?

Hi All,

We are currently transitioning from using the Puppet Enterprise (PE) ENC to 
using hiera. Howevver, one piece of functionality that we lack with hiera 
is the ability to group systems together based on function. We can only 
currently group the systems based on available facts and are currently 
using environment, osfamily and domain in our hierarchy, however it would 
be extremely useful to also have a "group" or "role"
category in our hiera
hierarchy.

As I see it we have a few options and hopefully, people here can add better 
options that they are using.

The first is to use groups within the PE ENC which can apparently be used 
as a variable within the hiera hierarchy. This would be an easy solution, 
but not a very scalable one as putting systems into groups using the PE 
console is very slow and I haven't seen a documented way to manipulate the 
PE console data using a command line tool.

Second is to create a custom fact named group, but this requires that each 
system has a yaml file dropped in the correct place and I don't see a good 
way to automate creation of these files using PE, which would make it 
scalable. One way to do it would be to create a hiera yaml for each system 
with group parameter set, but the whole point of this exercise is to avoid 
creating hiera yamls for each system in our environment. I don't see having 
1000+ hiera yamls as very scalable or manageable.

Third, of course, is to just manage this with individual hiera yamls for 
each system where classes required for that system's functions, but
can't
be defined higher up in the hierarchy, would be called out, but as I said 
before, this option isn't very scalable or manageable.

If you are using Puppet and hiera, how are you managing groups of systems 
(web servers, Nessus servers, mail servers, etc.)?

Thanks,

Alex

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