Preface

Configuration management has become a requirement for system administrators. Knowing how to use configuration management tools, such as Puppet, enables administrators to take full advantage of automated provisioning systems and cloud resources. There is a natural progression from performing a task, scripting a task to creating a module in Puppet, or Puppetizing a task.

This book takes you beyond the basics and explores 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 complete code samples for every recipe. It takes you from a rudimentary knowledge of Puppet to a more complete and expert understanding of Puppet's latest and most advanced features, community best practices, scaling, and performance. This edition of the book includes recipes for configuring and using Hiera, puppetdb and operating a centralized puppetmaster configuration.

This book also includes real examples from production systems and techniques that are in use in some of the world's largest Puppet installations. It will show you different ways to do things using Puppet, and point out some of the pros and cons of these approaches.

The book is structured so that you can dip in at any point and try out a recipe without having to work your way through from cover to cover. Whatever your level of Puppet experience, there's something for you—from simple workflow tips to advanced, high-performance Puppet architectures.

Puppet is an ever-changing ecosystem of tools. I've tried to include all the tools that I feel are important today, such as r10k. The #puppet IRC channel, puppetlabs blog (http://puppetlabs.com/blog), and the Forge (http://forge.puppetlabs.com) are great resources to stay up to date with the changes being made to Puppet.