Book Image

Puppet 3 Cookbook - Second Edition

By : John Arundel
Book Image

Puppet 3 Cookbook - Second Edition

By: John Arundel

Overview of this book

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. You'll be introduced to powerful tools that work with Puppet such as Hiera. The book also explains managing Ruby applications and MySQL databases, building web servers, load balancers, high-availability systems with Heartbeat, and many other state-of-the-art techniques
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Puppet 3 Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Managing EC2 instances


It doesn't make sense for many of us to own and host our own servers, in the same way as it doesn't make sense for us to generate our own electricity. Just like electricity, computing is now a utility. Utility computing (often called cloud computing, for no known reason) allows you to buy as much compute power as you need, for as long as you need it. This makes it easy and cost-efficient to scale your service in response to fluctuating demand.

Being able to create new cloud server instances, use them for a few minutes or hours, and then delete them also makes it a lot easier to test and experiment with new software or configurations. If you had to build the servers by hand every time, this process would be too lengthy to make it worthwhile, but with automated configuration management, it's a snap.

There are plenty of cloud service providers around, with Amazon's EC2 being one of the best-known and oldest-established. In this recipe I'll show you how to manage cloud instances...