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.

It takes the reader from rudimentary knowledge of Puppet to a more complete and expert understanding of Puppet's latest and most advanced features, community best practices, writing great manifests, scaling and performance, and how to extend Puppet by adding your own providers and resources.

This book also includes real examples from production systems and techniques that are in use in some of the world's largest Puppet installations. It will show you different ways to do things using Puppet and point out some of the pros and cons of these approaches.

The book is structured so that you can dip in at any point and try out a recipe without having to work your way through from cover to cover. You'll find links and references to more information on every topic, so that you can explore further for yourself. Whatever your level of Puppet experience, there's something for you, from simple workflow tips to advanced, high-performance Puppet architectures.

I've tried hard to write the kind of book that would be useful to me in my day-to-day work as a devops consultant. I hope it will inspire you to learn, to experiment, and to come up with your own new ideas in this exciting and fast-moving field.