Puppet 2.7 Cookbook

Build reliable, scalable, secure, high-performance systems to fully utilize the power of cloud computing

• Shows you how to use 100 powerful advanced features of Puppet, with detailed step-by-step instructions
• Covers all the popular tools and frameworks used with Puppet: Dashboard, Foreman, MCollective, and more
• Includes the latest features and updates in Puppet 2.7
• Written in a simple, practical style by a professional systems administrator and Puppet expert, every recipe has detailed step-by-step instructions showing you the exact commands and configuration settings you need

In Detail

A revolution is coming to IT operations. Configuration management tools can build servers in seconds, and automate your entire network. Tools like Puppet are essential to take full advantage of the power of cloud computing, and build reliable, scalable, secure, high-performance systems.

The book 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 how to extend Puppet by adding your own providers and resources.

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 and a high-performance Puppetmaster solution using Apache and Passenger.

Explore the power of Puppet with this practical guide to the world’s most popular configuration management system

What you will learn from this book

• Make Puppet reliable, performant, and scalable
• Produce eye-catching reports and information for management
• Understand common error messages and troubleshooting common problems
• Manage large networks with tools like Foreman and MCollective
• Use classes and inheritance to write powerful Puppet code
• Deploy configuration files and templates for lightning-fast installations
• Use virtual machines to build test and staging environments, and production systems on cloud platforms such as EC2
• Automate every aspect of your systems including provisioning, deployment and change management

Approach

This book is written in a Cookbook style showing you how to set up and expand your Puppet infrastructure. It 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.

Who this book is written for

The book assumes that the reader already has a working Puppet installation and perhaps has written some basic manifests or adapted some published modules. It also requires some experience of Linux systems administration, including familiarity with the command line, file system, and text editing. No programming experience is required.