You can now move configuration settings to Hiera and dedicate your manifest to logic. This works seamlessly as far as classes and their parameters are concerned, because class parameters automatically retrieve their values from Hiera. For configuration that requires you to instantiate resources, you still need to write the full manifests and add manual lookup function calls.

For example, an Apache web server requires some global settings, but the interesting parts of its configuration are typically performed in virtual host configuration files. Puppet models them with defined resource types. If you want to configure an iptables firewall, you have to declare lots of resources of the firewall type (available through the puppetlabs-firewall module).

Such elaborate resources can clutter up your manifest, yet they mostly represent data. There is no inherent...