Russell-Yates Ryan - Mastering Puppet 5: optimize enterprise-grade environment performance with Puppet

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Ryan Russell-Yates is a technical consultant in the fields of automation, DevOps, and infrastructure architecture. He has helped numerous IT practitioners at companies of various shapes and sizes across a range of industries to implement automation best practices at scale. Ryan's true passion in the technology industry is teaching practitioners new tools, technologies, and strategies for dealing with today's complicated digital landscape.

Jason Southgate has been working in the IT industry for more than 15 years, has been using Puppet for more than 6 years, and has tackled some very large projects in Europe, most recently creating an IaaS/PaaS cloud for KPN, the Netherlands' premier telecommunications company, using Puppet Enterprise at a very large scale. Jason was certified in Puppet in 2014, and also has AWS and Azure certification.

Deniz Parlak has worked with Linux/UNIX technologies for more than five years. He is a [Dev-Sys-Sec]Ops enthusiast. Deniz is currently working with [Dev-Sys-Sec]Ops applications, especially Docker, Ansible, Kubernetes, and cloud providers, and continues to share information about new technologies with people at many technical conferences and lectures. He has also published a book entitled CentOS System and Server Management, and is still writing Docker and Bash scripting books. His presentations on the Zeus tool and AWS hardening were selected for events such as Black Hat Asia 2018, DevOpsDays, and NuitDuHack.

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Puppet 5 remains the software configuration management software of choice, especially for larger-scale configurations.

Here are some examples of current real-world use cases of Puppet:

• Twitter uses Puppet for what is currently one of the larger social networking infrastructures (https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastructure/2017/the-infrastructure-behind-twitter-scale.html). Facebook uses Opscode Chef, the competitive product in the software configuration management category.
• Uber uses Puppet for its standard configuration management (https://eng.uber.com/uchat/).
• Walmart is also a very large Puppet user (https://puppet.com/blog/how-walmart-scaled-puppet-55K-nodes-and-beyond).

Although there are newer products, such as Ansible and Salt, Puppet remains I believe the premier tool, especially for such larger infrastructures (10,000+ servers). It is worth mentioning that Ansible has also become very popular, possibly due to its shallower learning curve and adoption by Red Hat.

Dealing with this level of scale and complexity is non-trivial. With this book, Mastering Puppet 5, we want to put the know-how at your disposal to tackle your own large-scale challenges, at mastery level.

Version 5 of Puppet, which is the version covered by this book, was announced with considerable fanfare at last year's PuppetConf (2017) by the new CEO, Sanjay Mirchandani, as "Puppet's largest set of product innovations. Ever." In this book, we've gone through these new technologies, including Puppet Discovery, Puppet Tasks, and Puppet Pipelines, to give you the know-how you need to use Puppet 5 in the real world with confidence.

If you are a system administrator or developer who has already used Puppet and are looking for mastery-level skills and best practices with a view to using Puppet in an enterprise environment, at large scale, this book is for you. Some beginner-level knowledge of using Puppet would be necessary.