Martin Alfke - Puppet 5 Essentials: A fast-paced guide to automating your infrastructure

BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI

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First published: November 2014

Second edition: December 2015

Third edition: September 2017

Production reference: 1080917

ISBN 978-1-78728-471-5

www.packtpub.com

Martin Alfke is the co-founder and CEO of example42 GmbH. He has been a Puppet and automation enthusiast since 2007 and has delivered official Puppet training in Germany since 2011. In the past, he would have said that he is a system administrator. Nowadays, he prefers the term infrastructure engineer. The big difference is that system administrators ssh into systems, whereas infrastructure engineers fix their automation. With example42 GmbH, Martin supports Puppet Inc as a Puppet service delivery partner. He likes giving talks and workshops at conferences around the globe.

Felix Frank has used and programmed computers for most of his life. During and after working on his computer science diploma, he gained experience on the job as a systems administrator, server operator, and open source software developer. He spent six years of his eleven year career as a Puppet power user. In parallel, he spent about two years intensifying his studies through ongoing source code contributions and active participation in several conferences.

Thomas Dao has worn many hats in IT, from Unix administration, build/release engineering, DevOps engineering, Android development, and now, dad to his bundle of joy, Carina. He also enjoys being an organizer of the Eastside Android Developers GDG meetup group. He can be reached at tom@tomseattle.com.

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Puppet is a configuration management tool that allows you to automate all your IT configurations, giving you control over what you do with each Puppet agent in a network, and when and how you do it. In this age of digital delivery and ubiquitous internet presence, it's becoming increasingly important to implement scalable and portable solutions, not only in terms of software but also the system that runs it.

This book aims to impart knowledge required to tap into not only the basics of Puppet, but also its core. The very basic ideas and principles of Puppet-based designs are explored and explained in this book. A sophisticated tool is presented to enable efficient and productive use.

, Writing Your First Manifests, explains Puppet declarative configuration management based on resources and how to implement them.

, Puppet Server and Agents, covers installation and configuration of Puppet Server, and how to comment agents to the server.

, A Peek into the Ruby Part of Puppet - Facts, Types, and Providers, explains the underlying functions of Facter and its facts, types, and providers in Puppet.

, Combining Resources in Classes and Defined Types, covers self-defined resources that allow you to simplify a repetitive code.

, Combining Classes, Configuration Files, and Extensions into Modules, explains the concepts of Puppet environments and node classification.

, The Puppet Beginners Advanced Parts, covers the Puppet features that offer readability, flexibility, and improvements such as EPP templates, virtual and exported resources, and resource defaults.

, New Features from Puppet 4 and 5, explains the concept of Puppet environments and node classification.

, Separation of Code and Data with Hiera