Arundel - Puppet 3.0 Beginner’s Guide

John Arundel is an infrastructure consultant who helps people make their computer systems more reliable, useful, and cost-effective and has fun doing it. He has what Larry Wall describes as the three great virtues of a programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris.

Laziness, because he doesn't like doing work that a computer could do instead. Impatience, because he wants to get stuff done right away. Hubris, because he likes building systems that are as good as he can make them.

He was formerly a senior operations engineer at global telco Verizon, designing resilient, high-performance infrastructures for corporations such as Ford, McDonald's, and Bank of America. He now works independently, helping to bring enterprise-grade performance and reliability to clients with slightly smaller pockets but very big ideas.

He likes writing books, especially about Puppet. It seems that at least some people enjoy reading them, or maybe they just like the pictures. He also occasionally provides training and coaching on Puppet, which turns out to be far harder than simply doing the work himself.

Off the clock, he can usually be found driving a Land Rover up some mountain or other. He lives in a small cottage in Cornwall and believes, like Cicero, that if you have a garden and a library, then you have everything you need.

You can follow him on Twitter at @bitfield.

Thanks are due to my friend Luke Kanies, who created a configuration management tool that sucks less, and also to the many proofreaders and contributors to this book, including Andy Brockhurst, Tim Eilers, Martin Ellis, Adam Garside, Stefan Goethals, Jennifer Harbison, Kanthi Kiran, Cristian Leonte, Habeeb Rahman, John Smith, Sebastiaan van Steenis, Jeff Sussna, Nate Walck, Bryan Weber, and Matt Willsher.

Ugo Bellavance has done most of his studies in e-commerce, started using Linux at Red Hat 5.2, got Linux training from Savoir-Faire-Linux at the age of 20, and got his RHCE on RHEL 6 in 2011. He's been a consultant in the past, but he's now an employee for a provincial government agency for which he manages the infrastructure (servers, workstations, network, security, virtualization, SAN/NAS, PBX). He's a big fan of open-source software and its underlying philosophy. He's worked with Debian, Ubuntu, and SUSE, but what he knows best is RHEL-based distributions. He's known for his contributions to the MailScanner project (he has been a technical reviewer for the MailScanner book), but he also gave time to different open-source projects, such as mondorescue, OTRS, SpamAssassin, pfSense, and a few others.

I thank my lover, Lysanne, who accepted allowing me some free time slots for this review even with a 2-year-old and a 6-month-old to take care of. The presence of these 3 human beings in my life is simply invaluable.

I must also thank my friend Sbastien, whose generosity is only matched by his knowledge and kindness. I would never have reached that high in my career if it wasn't for him.

Jason Slagle is a 15-year veteran of Systems and Network administration. Having worked on everything from Linux systems to Cisco networks and SAN Storage, he is always looking for ways to make his work repeatable and automated. When he is not hacking at a computer for work or pleasure, he enjoys running, cycling, and occasionally geocaching.

He is currently employed by CNWR, Inc., an IT and Infrastructure consulting company in his home town of Toledo, Ohio. There he supports several larger customers in their quest to automate and improve their infrastructure and development operations.

I'd like to thank my wife, Heather, for being patient through the challenges of being married to a lifelong systems guy, and my new son, Jacob, for bringing a smile to my face on even the longest days.

Johan De Wit was an early Linux user and he still remembers those days building a 0.9x Linux kernel on his brand-new 486 computer that took a whole night, and always had a great love for the UNIX Operating System.

It is not surprising that he started a career as a UNIX system administrator.

Since 2009, he has been working as an open-source consultant at Open-Future, where he got the opportunity to work with Puppet. Right now, Puppet has become Johan's biggest interest, and recently he became a Puppet trainer.

Besides his work with Puppet, he spends a lot of his free time with his two lovely kids and his two Belgian draft horses, and if time and the weather permit, he likes to drive his chopper.

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