Pro Puppet [Paperback]

James Turnbull (Author), Jeffrey McCune (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 4, 2011 | ISBN-10: 1430230576 | ISBN-13: 978-1430230571

Pro Puppet is an in-depth guide to installing, using, and developing the popular configuration management tool Puppet. The book is a comprehensive follow-up to the previous title Pulling Strings with Puppet. Puppet provides a way to automate everything from user management to server configuration. You'll learn how to create Puppet recipes, extend Puppet, and use Facter to gather configuration data from your servers.

Puppet is a must-have tool for system administrators, and Pro Puppet will teach you how to maximize its capabilities and customize it for your environment.

• Install and configure Puppet to immediately start automating tasks and create reporting solutions
• Learn insider tricks and techniques to better manage your infrastructure
• Become a Puppet expert!

What you’ll learn

• See how to install Puppet on a variety of platforms
• Learn how to manage infrastructure with Puppet
• Discover how to scale Puppet to suit small, medium, and large organizations
• Learn how to integrate Puppet with other tools such as Cucumber and Nagios
• Discover advanced Puppet techniques to make managing your environment easier
• Learn how to develop and extend Puppet to suit your environment

Who this book is for

Systems administrators, implementers and systems integrators.

Table of Contents

1. Getting Started with Puppet
2. Building Hosts with Puppet
3. Working with Environments
4. Puppet Scalability
5. Externalizing Puppet Configuration
6. Exporting and Storing Configuration
7. Puppet Consoles: Dashboard and The Foreman
8. Tools and Integration
9. Reporting with Puppet
10. Extending Facter and Puppet
11. Marionette Collective
12. Working with Puppet

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

James Turnbull is the author of five technical books about open source software and a longtime member of the open source community. James authored the first and second books about Puppet, and works for Puppet Labs, running client services. James speaks regularly at conferences including OSCON, Linux.conf.au, FOSDEM, OpenSourceBridge, DevOpsDays and a number of others. He is a past president of Linux Australia, has run Linux.conf.au and serves on the program committee of Linux.conf.au and OSCON. James is Australian but currently lives in Portland, Oregon. His interests include cooking, wine, political theory, photojournalism, philosophy, and most recently the Portland Timbers association football team.

A bio is not available for this author.

Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Apress (May 4, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1430230576
• ISBN-13: 978-1430230571
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 0.7 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #51,652 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #14 in Books > Computers & Technology > Operating Systems > Linux > Networking & System Administration

More About the Author

James Turnbull works for Puppet Labs as VP of Technical Operations
managing the customer-facing business units including Services,
Sales Engineering, Support, Operations, Education and Community Management.

James has previously for the National Australia Bank as the manager of
the CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) and as an Executive
Manager of IT Security at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, the CIO of a medical research
foundation doing Web-based clinical trials, managing the architecture
group of an outsourcing company and in a number of IT roles in gaming,
telecommunications and government.

He is an experienced infrastructure architect with a background in
Linux/Unix, AS/400, Windows, and storage systems. He has been involved
in security consulting, infrastructure security design, SLA and service
definition and has an abiding interest in security metrics and measurement.

James is involved in the Free and Open Source Software community as a
developer and contributor. He was the Treasurer, member of the papers
committee, and coordinated the mini-conference program at linux.conf.au
2008 in Melbourne, Australia. He is also a member of Linux Australia,
including serving on the Executive Council in 2008 and President in 2010.

In his spare time his interests include cooking, wine, political theory,
photojournalism, philosophy, poetry, and cats.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars One might also title it Pro Deployments May 20, 2011

By Sean P. Hull

Format:Paperback

Just finished reading Pro Puppet and I'm pretty impressed. If I were to summarize in a few short words I'd say this book could have easily been titled "Pro Deployments" as it really covers a whole host of tools that support Puppet and configuration management in general.

I am fairly new to puppet though I have a strong conceptual understanding of configuration management in general. Although puppet may be thought of as a tool to be used for very large environments, it can also be used to good advantage at smaller sites just for the versioning of your configs, and better testing.

For a quick summary of topics I found well covered here's a bullet point list:

o installing puppet, master & agent
o configuring your firewall appropriately
o managing your certificates for puppet
o applying a basic config as proof of concept
o digging in deeper with Puppet's declarative DSL
o using version control (git) with puppet - a big win for any environment
o brief mention of bootstrapping and provisioning - kickstart & preseed
o modules, classes, functions and templates
o building and managing your basic dev, test and production environments
o using a pre-commit hook with your version control system
o scaling puppet with apache & passenger
o adding a load balancer and clustering
o horizontal scaling puppet ca & masters
o external node classifications - allowing a more scalable solution for manifests & configs
o using LDAP for node information

Hitting chapter six really starts digging into some meaty topics including:

o virtualizing your configurations - applying conditionally or "realizing" to certain nodes
o enable queueing for more scalable puppet requests
o in-depth examples to manage ssh keys, nagios configs & load balancers with dynamic node configuration - awesome!
o using sqlite or mysql to store your puppet configs
o using web consoles such as dashboard and foreman
o creating puppet modules (like RPM packages)
o installing existing puppet modules (packages) from the puppet forge
o alternate DSL for puppet with Ruby DSL
o testing your configs without alternate test network - cucumber
o command line & dashboard reporting
o extending the facter database with custom environment variables

After all this material you might be stuck on the idea that Puppet does not operate in real-time. By default it is configured to refresh configs and services on your servers every thirty minutes. Of course you can do so manually, or adjust this parameter, but you may require real-time usage.

Enter Marionette Collective, an imaginative name for an add-on which extends Puppet to provide this more robust functionality.

Pro Puppet certainly introduces a wide range of real-world use-cases to the reader, which make the book very valuable. Using with version control, to manage dev, test and production, and scaling to handle large number of hosts are all key topics. What's more the method of automatically configuring nodes in your load balancer, nagios, or cacti reporting, is just a really great use of this technology.

What I found surprisingly missing though was any mention of using Puppet for provisioning or more specifically cloud deployments. This is I think a topic that everyone is talking about and one that few books are covering. An opportunity perhaps! Along with that, I would have liked to see a comprehensive discussion of different configuration management systems, such as cfengine, and chef, and why Puppet is the best and/or what the pros and cons of each are.

Despite those reservations, the book was excellent. If you've already decided to use puppet in your environment this is a very good volume to get you up to speed!

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Good overview of puppet; poor book editing July 13, 2011

By Kristian Erik Hermansen

Format:Paperback

This is a great overview of Puppet software and the associated administration tools. I finished reading it on a flight from Orlando to Los Angeles, but the number of spelling mistakes and other editing errors I encountered irked me so much that I stopped marking them down. The editor should seriously have someone review the content again.

Other than the editing issues, I would give the book content four stars for touching on most of the features of puppet and how to integrate with other related software packages, such as mcollective. The author does point out many areas where puppet can be frustrating, but he recommends numerous methods to workaround such issues. The author goes on to talk about upcoming features in puppet 2.7 and beyond, so the content is forward-looking, even in the fast-paced community of puppet development.

I would recommend this book to those looking to gain mastery of puppet >= version 2.6.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Excelent Content but could use some serious editing December 21, 2011

By Powertoaster

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

I have really enjoyed the book so far, it has definitely made learning puppet a much nicer experience.

I would have given it 5 stars except that this book and the source code that goes with it, is replete with typos and poor grammatical structure.
There are several sections in the book that seem quite disjointed, like the author knew where he was going in his head but spaced out a paragraph here or there.
The scary part is that I am only to chapter 2.

Most of the code examples do not run as is and need editing.

IMHO, this is a beta version book, and was rushed out with great content but very little editing or review.