Hiera is a powerful and integrated solution to manage Puppet data outside our code. It requires some extra knowledge and abstraction, but it brings with it a lot of flexibility and extendibility, thanks to its backend plugins.

In this chapter, we have seen how it works and how to use it, especially when coupled with data bindings. We have also reviewed the most used plugins and grasped the power that comes with them.

Now is the time to explore another relatively new and great component of a Puppet infrastructure that is going to change how we use and write Puppet code—PuppetDB.