John Arundel - Puppet 3 Cookbook

John Arundel is a devops consultant, which means he solves difficult problems for a living. (He doesn't get called in for easy problems.)

He has worked in the tech industry for 20 years, and during that time has done wrong (or seen done wrong) almost everything that you can do wrong with computers. That comprehensive knowledge of what not to do, he feels, is one of his greatest assets as a consultant. He is still adding to it.

He likes writing books, especially about Puppet ( The Puppet 3 Beginner's Guide is available from the same publisher). It seems that at least some people enjoy reading them. He also provides training and coaching on Puppet, which it turns out is 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.

My thanks go to Rene Lehmann, Cristian Leonte, German Rodriguez, Keiran Sweet, Dean Wilson, and Dan White for their help with proofreading and suggestions. Special thanks are due to Lance Murray and Sebastiaan van Steenis, who diligently read and tested every chapter, and provided invaluable feedback on what did and didn't make sense.

Dhruv Ahuja is a Lead Engineer at a managed hosting provider. He specializes in infrastructure solutions design and configuration, with a keen eye on achieving mechanical sympathy. His first brush with Puppet was in 2011 when he developed a solution on dynamically scaling compute nodes for a multi-purpose grid platform. He also holds a master's degree in Advanced Software Engineering from King's College London, and won the Red Hat UK Channel Consultant of the Year award in 2012 for delivering progressive solutions. A long history in conventional software development and traditional systems administration equip him with aptness in both areas, and he bridges many infrastructural gaps in a well-delimited way. In this era of infrastructure as code, he believes that declarative abstraction is essential for a maintainable systems life-cycle process.

Carlos N. A. Corra is an IT Operations manager and consultant, and is also a Puppet enthusiast and an old-school Linux hacker. He has a Master's Degree in Systems Virtualization and holds CISSP and RHCE certifications. Backed by a 15-year career on systems administration, Carlos leads IT Operations teams for companies both in Brazil and Africa. He is also a part-time professor for graduate and undergraduate courses in Brazil. Carlos co-authored several research papers on network virtualization and OpenFlow, presented on peer-reviewed IEEE and ACM conferences worldwide.

I thank God for all the opportunities of hard work and all the lovely people I always found on my way. To the sweetest of them all, my wife Nanda, I give thanks for all the loving care and support that pushes me forward. And to my parents, Nilton and Zlia, for being such a big inspiration for all the things that I do.

Daniele Sluijters is a student of Informatics and has been working as a systems operator for a few years. Initially it all started out as a hobby, but eventually it turned into both his field of study and work. His primary focus in both work and study for the past years have been large(r) networks made up of mostly Unix systems offering services to the world disclosed over the internet and how to manage and secure both the systems, the services they provide, and the networks they use. He has also worked on the book Zabbix Network Monitoring Essentials, Munin Plugin Starter

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Preface

A revolution is underway in the field of IT operations. The new generation of configuration management tools can build servers in seconds and automate your entire network. Tools such as Puppet are essential to take full advantage of the power of cloud computing, and build reliable, scalable, secure, 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.