A revolution is happening in web operations. Configuration management tools can build servers in seconds, and automate your entire network. Tools like Puppet are essential to taking full advantage of the power of cloud computing, and building reliable, scalable, secure, high-performance systems. More and more systems administration and IT jobs require some knowledge of configuration management, and specifically Puppet.

"Puppet 3 Cookbook" takes you beyond the basics to explore 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 full code samples for every recipe.

The book takes the reader from a basic knowledge of Puppet to a complete and expert understanding of Puppet’s latest and most advanced features, community best practices, writing great manifests, scaling and performance, and extending Puppet by adding your own providers and resources. It starts with guidance on how to set up and expand your Puppet infrastructure, then progresses through detailed information on the language and features, external tools, reporting, monitoring, and troubleshooting, and concludes with many specific recipes for managing popular applications.

The book includes real examples from production systems and techniques that are in use in some of the world’s largest Puppet installations, including a distributed Puppet architecture based on the Git version control system. You’ll be introduced to powerful tools that work with Puppet such as Hiera. The book also explains managing Ruby applications and MySQL databases, building web servers, load balancers, high-availability systems with Heartbeat, and many other state-of-the-art techniques

What you will learn from this book

• Installing and setting up Puppet for the first time
• Producing eye-catching reports and information for management
• Understanding common error messages and troubleshooting common problems
• Managing large networks
• Taking control of configuration data with Hiera and encrypting secrets with GnuPG
• Producing reliable, clean, maintainable code to community standards with puppet-lint and rspec-puppet
• Using classes and inheritance to write powerful Puppet code
• Deploying configuration files and templates for lightning-fast installations
• Using virtual machines to build test and staging environments, and production systems on cloud platforms such as EC2
• Automating every aspect of your systems including provisioning, deployment and change management
• Making Puppet reliable, performant, and scalable