Acknowledgments
I'd like to thank my editors, Sam Wood, Sweny M. Sukumaran, and Mrunal M. Chavan, for their ongoing support and for making this title possible in the first place. This book would not be what it is without the amazing feedback from my reviewers, Ger Apeldoorn, Brian Moore, Josh Partlow, and Thomas Dao.
I'd also like to thank a number of Puppet Labs employees for their kind feedback and ongoing supportAndrew Parker, Adrien Thebo, Dawn Foster, Joshua Partlow, Josh Cooper, Henrik Lindberg, Charlie Sharpsteen, Kylo Ginsberg, Ethan Brown, Rob Reynolds, Jeff McCune, and Eric Sorenson. Special thanks to Luke Kanies for creating Puppet and dedicating so many resources to this amazing community.
Further thanks to Waltraut Niepraschk and the entire data center staff at DESY Zeuthen for getting me on track with the central management of Unix servers. Also, thanks to MPeXnetworks for giving me the opportunity to learn more about Puppet and ultimately helping me write this very book.
About the Reviewers
Ger Apeldoorn is a freelance Puppet consultant and teaches official Puppet Labs courses in the Netherlands. He has helped implement Puppet in many companies, both open source and Enterprise, and has given a presentation on Manageable Puppet Infrastructure at PuppetConf and other conferences. He recently found out that writing about himself in third person can be a bit awkward.
Thomas Dao has spent over two decades playing around with various Unix flavors as a Unix administrator, build and release engineer, and configuration manager. He is passionate about open source software and tools, so Puppet was something he naturally gravitated toward. Currently employed in the telecommunications industry as a configuration analyst, he also divides some of his time as a technical editor at devops.ninja.
I would like to thank my lovely wife, whose patience with me while I'm glued to my monitor gives me the inspiration to pursue my passions, and my dog, Bento, who is always by my side, giving me company.
Brian Moore is a senior product engineer, a father of two, and a quintessential hacker. He began coding at the age of 12. His early love for everything technological led to a job with Apple shortly after high school. Since that time, he has worked with a series of start-ups and tech companies, taking on interesting technical challenges. He was also the technical reviewer for Rhomobile Beginner's Guide , Packt Publishing . When not working on new development projects, he can often be found off-roading in a remote Southern California desert in his Baja Bug.
Josh Partlow is a software developer working in Portland, OR. He started working as a freelance consultant in the early 90s and has worked on a variety of database, web, and networking projects in Java, Perl, and Ruby, developing primarily on Linux platforms. He helped found OpenSourcery and currently works at Puppet Labs on the core Puppet project itself. He lives in Portland with his wife, Julia, and their two cats, Fred and Ethel, who are mostly nothing like their namesakes.
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Preface
The software industry is changing and so are its related fields. Old paradigms are slowly giving way to new roles and shifting views on what the different professions should bring to the table. The DevOps trend pervades evermore workflows. Developers set up and maintain their own environments, and operations raise automation to new levels and translate whole infrastructures to code.