A revolution is happening in web operations. Configuration management tools can build servers in seconds, and automate your entire network. Tools like Puppet are essential to taking full advantage of the power of cloud computing, and building reliable, scalable, secure, high-performance systems. More and more systems administration and IT jobs require some knowledge of configuration management, and specifically Puppet.
"Puppet 3 Cookbook" takes you beyond the basics to explore the full power of Puppet, showing you in detail how to tackle a variety of real-world problems and applications. At every step it shows you exactly what commands you need to type, and includes full code samples for every recipe.
The book takes the reader from a basic knowledge of Puppet to a complete and expert understanding of Puppet’s latest and most advanced features, community best practices, writing great manifests, scaling and performance, and extending Puppet by adding your own providers and resources. It starts with guidance on how to set up and expand your Puppet infrastructure, then progresses through detailed information on the language and features, external tools, reporting, monitoring, and troubleshooting, and concludes with many specific recipes for managing popular applications.
The book includes real examples from production systems and techniques that are in use in some of the world’s largest Puppet installations, including a distributed Puppet architecture based on the Git version control system. It covers common problems and errors and shows you how to troubleshoot your Puppet manifests. You’ll be introduced to powerful tools that work with Puppet such as Hiera and MCollective. You’ll learn how to use objection orientation and classes to write powerful, reusable manifests, and how to embed Ruby code in templates. You’ll find out how to extend Puppet with custom resource types and providers. The book also explains managing Rails applications and databases, building web servers, load balancers, high-availability systems with Heartbeat, and many other state-of-the-art techniques.
John Arundel
John Arundel is a devops consultant, which means he solves difficult problems for a living. (He doesn't get called in for easy problems.)
He has worked in the tech industry for 20 years, and during that time has done wrong (or seen done wrong) almost everything that you can do wrong with computers. That comprehensive knowledge of what not to do, he feels, is one of his greatest assets as a consultant. He is still adding to it.
He likes writing books, especially about Puppet (The Puppet 3 Beginner's Guide is available from the same publisher). It seems that at least some people enjoy reading them. He also provides training and coaching on Puppet, which it turns out is far harder than simply doing the work himself.
Off the clock, he can usually be found driving a Land Rover up some mountain or other. He lives in a small cottage in Cornwall and believes, like Cicero, that if you have a garden and a library, then you have everything you need.
You can follow him on Twitter at @bitfield.
