In this chapter, we built a foundation for things we will do in chapters to come. First, we covered what Puppet is, and how it differs from other tools in its space. We gave a brief introduction to some of the other Puppet components we'll be using in this book as well.

Moving on from this, we covered how to install Puppet on CentOS. We went through a full installation example and covered the basics of configuration files.

Then, we covered the configuration and installation of Vagrant and used it to run our first example. In this example, we configured SSH with a secure configuration file.

Finally, we introduced how Puppet fits into a security ecosystem. While keeping with the basics, we've begun exploring how Puppet can be used to process simple configuration tasks to secure your systems.

This chapter focused on several high-level concepts. As we get further into the book, we'll go more in-depth in examples and they will get much more powerful. As an introductory chapter, the hope was to get you up and running with a working manifest. In future chapters, we will assume a base level of knowledge and link to references you can use if needed.

Additionally, if you wish to get some more information on the base Puppet language before we proceed, there are several books available. Some of them were mentioned earlier in this chapter, and we'll cover more as we proceed through the book. The documentation at http://docs.puppetlabs.com is also very informative, if a little dry at times.

In the next chapter, we'll begin to use our knowledge gained here to explore how Puppet can be used to track changes to resources on our filesystems.