In this chapter, we talked about virtual and exported resources. Virtual resources allow us to describe what a resource should be, and realize it under other conditions. Exported resources allow us to announce our virtual resources to other nodes in the infrastructure by using PuppetDB. We examined writing a virtual resource for administrative users and placed a file in /tmp for all other nodes in our infrastructure using exported resources. We then explored using exported resources to create an /etc/hosts file, a load balancer, a database, and an example of building a custom configuration file with concat and file_line.

When we applied these exported resources across our systems, we noticed that the main limitation of these resources is timing. Our infrastructure will eventually converge, but it does not happen in an orchestrated and timely fashion. Our next chapter will be on application orchestration, which allows us to tie a multitier application together and orchestrate the order Puppet runs in on those nodes.