Puppet Essentials

About This Book

• Quickly get to grips with writing your own manifest programs for Puppet
• Speedily learn to set up your own Puppet infrastructure
• Avoid common pitfalls in order to rapidly grasp Puppet's advanced features

Who This Book Is For

If you're an experienced IT professional or a new Puppet user, Puppet Essentials provides you with all you need to know to go from installation to advanced automation in no time at all. Experience with system operations and server management as well as the Ruby language, is helpful to get the most out of this book.

What You Will Learn

• Write and employ individual Puppet manifests


• Understand how Puppet implements system abstraction


• Deploy the Puppet master and its agents


• Leverage and extend Facter to summarize your systems


• Create modular and reusable Puppet code


• Extend your code base with publicly available Puppet modules


• Separate logic from data using Hiera


• Combine your new skills to manage large, complex systems

In Detail

With this book, you'll be up and running with using Puppet to manage your IT systems. Dive right in with basic commands so that you can use Puppet right away, and then blitz through a series of illustrative examples to get to grips with all the most important aspects and features of Puppet.

Install Puppet, write your first manifests, and then immediately put the Puppet tools to real work. Puppet Essentials reveals the innovative structure and approach of Puppet through step-by-step instructions to follow powerful use cases. Learn common troubleshooting techniques and the master/agent setup as well as the building blocks for advanced functions and topics that push Puppet to the limit, including classes and defined types, modules, resources, and leveraging the flexibility and expressive power implemented by Facter and the Hiera toolchain. Finally, send Puppet to the skies with practical guidance on how to use Puppet to manage a whole application cloud.