Arundel - Puppet 2.7 cookbook: build reliable, scalable, secure, high-performance systems to fully utilize the power of cloud computing

John Arundel is a consultant engineer who helps people build better infrastructure. He uses automation and configuration management to make computer systems cheaper, faster, and more reliable. Formerly a senior enterprise systems engineer in the hosting division of US telco Verizon, he now runs his own company, Bitfield Consulting, and says he has never worked so hard in his life, or for less money.

Over the years John has worked with clients in the advertising and media industry, software, finance, retail, logistics, and even the emergency services, advising on architecture, automation, security, backups, resilience, performance, capacity planning, and regulatory compliance. He has been a member of the Puppet community since its earliest days, and organizes regular local sysadmin meetups and social events.

John holds a B.Sc.(Hons) in Computer Science, with a research interest in kernel resource scheduler design, and is a certified Sun Solaris administrator, LPI (Linux Professional Institute) graduate, and a member of the British Computer Society (MBCS). He is security-cleared to work on computer systems for the UK nuclear industry, which is probably nothing to worry about.

He has also worked as a software developer, both professionally and for the fun of it, contributing to several open source projects, and building a high-performance research chess engine. He blogs regularly at http://bitfieldconsulting.com on Puppet and system administration topics, is usually to be found on Twitter (@bitfield) complaining about things, and often speaks at technical user groups and conferences.

In his negligible spare time, John enjoys repairing Land Rovers, playing Go, and barbecuing. He lives in London and Cornwall.

My thanks go to Luke Kanies and the team at Puppet Labs; also to Ken Barber, Lindsay Holmwood, Gary Larizza, Stephen Nelson-Smith, R.I. Pienaar, Julian Simpson, Jordan Sissel, Cosimo Streppone, James Turnbull, and Dean Wilson, who all provided valuable contributions to the book, whether they know it or not; and for their brave self-sacrifice in the cause of proofreading, Ian Chilton, Kris Buytaert, Stefan Goethals, and Martin Brooks. A special mention goes to the regulars of channel #puppet, who often helped out when things didn't work the way they were supposed to, which was virtually all the time.

Mark Philips has had a varied career spanning Motor Manufacturer, Internet, Telco, and Finance industries over the last 17 years. Engineering for UNIX estates from a handful of hosts through to many thousands, Mark has strived to automate anything and everything that had to be carried out more than once. Discovering Puppet in early 2007 was a boon to achieving his idea of systems nirvanasimple centralized and automated configuration management.

Mark runs an IT consultancy company, VNTX Limited, specializing in UNIX installation, integration, automation, and performance tuning.

When he's not in front of a computer, Mark can be found out riding one of his bicyclestraining for a race, or boring his ever patient wife talking about cycling.

Eric Stonfer is a 10 year veteran of systems administration, with an emphasis on automation and configuration systems, and has been using Puppet to manage thousands of servers for over 3 years. In his spare time Eric is an avid home brewer.

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Preface

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, and high-performance systems.

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 the reader from rudimentary knowledge of Puppet to a more 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.