In this chapter, we have taken a close look at the main differences between Hiera 5 and its earlier incarnations. We have also described how you can now quickly set up the encrypted YAML backend, so you no longer have to save your secret Hiera values in plain text.

We've also looked at Jerakia, which you can use to cover more advanced use cases, such as providing different hierarchies to different teams, and integrating Vault to provide something like an encryption as a service backend for Jerakia.

In the next chapter, let's continue our master class by examining the management of Puppet code.