This book is for anyone using or considering Puppet as a systems automation tool. Readers of this book should be familiar with Linux systems administration and basic Ruby. I’ll cover the basics of using Puppet manifests for configuration management and techniques for executing and managing those configurations with MCollective and Facter. I’ll often make suggestions that assume you are managing a virtualized infrastructure, but virtualization is not necessary to reap the benefits of this software.

Get started with Puppet, and learn how this popular configuration management framework helps you automate your servers. This concise introduction shows you how to use Puppet’s tools and templates to organize and execute configuration plans on Linux, Unix, and Windows servers. Through code samples and real-world examples, you’ll learn how to manage pools of servers and virtual instances, and how to administer access control. If you’re new to Puppet, but familiar with systems administration and Ruby language basics, this book is the ideal way to start using this open source framework.

• Learn Puppet fundamentals, including its manifest syntax and built-in functions
• Store configurations in a central location with PuppetMaster, and define which configurations apply to which nodes
• Build a framework to create user accounts in place of LDAP or Kerberos KDC
• Apply techniques to execute and manage server configurations with MCollective
• Use Puppet as an auditing tool to ensure that configurations are correct
• Gather information on the nodes you manage with the Facter library