Puppet 5 Beginner's Guide - Third Edition

Puppet 5 Beginner's Guide, Third Edition is a practical guide that gets you up and running with the very latest features of Puppet 5.

About This Book

• Develop skills to run Puppet 5 on single or multiple servers without hiccups
• Use Puppet to create and manage cloud resources such as Amazon EC2 instances
• Take full advantage of powerful new features of Puppet including loops, data types, Hiera integration, and container management

Who This Book Is For

Puppet 5 Beginner's Guide, Third Edition is designed for those who are new to Puppet, including system administrators and developers who are looking to manage computer server systems for configuration management. No prior programming or system administration experience is assumed.

What You Will Learn

• Understand the latest Puppet 5 features
• Install and set up Puppet and discover the latest and most advanced features
• Configure, build, and run containers in production using Puppet's industry-leading Docker support
• Deploy configuration files and templates at super-fast speeds and manage user accounts and access control
• Automate your IT infrastructure
• Use the latest features in Puppet 5 onward and its official modules
• Manage clouds, containers, and orchestration
• Get to know the best practices to make Puppet more reliable and increase its performance

In Detail

Puppet 5 Beginner's Guide, Third Edition gets you up and running with the very latest features of Puppet 5, including Docker containers, Hiera data, and Amazon AWS cloud orchestration. Go from beginner to confident Puppet user with a series of clear, practical examples to help you manage every aspect of your server setup.

Whether you're a developer, a system administrator, or you are simply curious about Puppet, you'll learn Puppet skills that you can put into practice right away. With practical steps giving you the key concepts you need, this book teaches you how to install packages and config files, create users, set up scheduled jobs, provision cloud instances, build containers, and so much more.

Every example in this book deals with something real and practical that you're likely to need in your work, and you'll see the complete Puppet code that makes it happen, along with step-by-step instructions for what to type and what output you'll see. All the examples are available in a GitHub repo for you to download and adapt for your own server setup.

Style and approach

This tutorial is packed with quick step-by-step instructions that are immediately applicable for beginners. This is an easy-to-read guide, to learn Puppet from scratch, that explains simply and clearly all you need to know to use this essential IT power tool, while applying these solutions to real-world scenarios.

John Arundel is a DevOps consultant, which means he helps people build world-class web operations teams and infrastructure and has fun doing it. He was formerly a senior operations engineer at global telco Verizon, designing resilient, high-performance infrastructures for major corporations such as Ford, McDonald's, and Bank of America. He is now an independent consultant, working closely with selected clients to deliver web-scale performance and enterprise-grade resilience on a startup budget.

He likes writing books, especially about Puppet (Puppet 2.7 Cookbook and Puppet 3 Cookbook are available from Packt as well). It seems that at least some people enjoy reading them, or maybe they just like the pictures. He also provides training and coaching on Puppet and DevOps, which, it turns out, is far harder than simply doing the work himself.

Off the clock, he is a medal-winning competitive rifle and pistol shooter and a decidedly uncompetitive piano player. He lives in a small cottage in Cornwall, England and believes, like Cicero, that if you have a garden and a library, then you have everything you need.

You may like to follow him on Twitter at @bitfield.