Puppet 3 Cookbook

by John Arundel

Build reliable, scalable, secure, and high-performance systems to fully utilize the power of cloud computing Overview In Detail 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. It covers common problems and errors and shows you how to troubleshoot your Puppet manifests. You’ll be introduced to powerful tools that work with Puppet such as Hiera and MCollective. You’ll learn how to use objection orientation and classes to write powerful, reusable manifests, and how to embed Ruby code in templates. You’ll find out how to extend Puppet with custom resource types and providers. The book also explains managing Rails applications and 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

258 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Carl Ma · Rating 5 out of 5]

John Arundel wrote another book - Puppet 2.7 cookbook in 2011. You can consider this one is the revised version with additional puppet 3 features added. Through this book, John shared his hands-on puppet development experience and gave his approach to deploy puppet infrastructure in distributed environment. Although each environment differs, reader will be able to get some idea from the usage described in book and apply the guideline within their own infrastructure.

Many people like me, we are not coding puppet every day. Instead we build the framework, we developed module to meet business request. Then we move on to the next task. We don't spend lots of time to tune our code for best efficiency, nor we study public module to learn tricks/patterns on daily basis. This book happens to be a good resource for such readers and it uses many user cases to demonstrate what is the most efficient way.

Author is not trying to cover every aspect in a less than 300 pages book. This book is more or less the summary of author's puppet working experience. He tried to list the most important concepts/features, wished readers can benefit from them and can have a more advanced start line.

I definitely recommend this book to people who start programming puppet and developers, who are doing intermittent puppet development.

[Sergio Jimenez · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book gives to the reader a very wide overview of what can be achieve with Puppet, going from the very beginning with basic examples to more complex situations, including external tools like hiera, ENCs, Vagrant and unit tests with rspec-puppet.

The approach the author has taken, has resulted in a very well structured book where the reader goes from a hands-on example to its explanation, with pros and cons.

As in most of technical books, the reader should have a clear and concise idea of what he wants to achieve with the tool in question, because in this case, the author presents an very specific way of working with Puppet (probably from due to his professional background) which could fit on reader's needs or not.

I definetely recomend the book for both experienced and beginners Puppet users, for the experienced ones it helps to expand knowledge and learn new tricks, for beginners it shows most of the useful things Puppet can do.

The only criticism I could mention is about a section called "Building packages automatically from source" where he shows how to download and compile software but it does not build a package as the word package is understood on Linux distributions.

Book - http://goo.gl/CBihSH

[Alessandro Franceschi · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a useful book for the beginner and intermediate Puppet user.
It draws the learning line with many different recipes that face common practical issues explained while throwing in some useful theory.
This learning pattern is generally used with success, having the benefit of showing code that can be tested and used immediately.
The downside is, as with other books that follow this approach, that the reader might not have an organic view of the topic (which actually is quite large).
I think anyway that the benefits are prevalent, and the book presents many interesting and useful patterns and tricks that can tell something new also to who is already using Puppet for some time.

Part of the content seems outdated, though. Some of the use cases expressed and their solutions are currently not considered good practices, but since in Puppet the concept of best practices is a moving target, I suppose this can be forgiven.

[Rakesh Kathpal · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am a solution architect and have been using puppet extensively for almost a year now. I really like the way John Arundel puts up the explanations and examples together. I actually started learning puppet by referring to the Puppet 2.7 Cookbook. Going thru and understanding the Puppet 3 cookbook has been a great experience. Though I am more on the infrastructure side, I have been able to develop my own recipes using the guidance from the book.

Puppet 3 cookbook covers all topics extensively, right from getting started with puppet to advanced configurations and writing complex manifests.

I would suggest it to be a "Must Read" to everyone working with puppet.

I got my Print + free eBook from Packt Publishing

[Paul Miles · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a regular puppet user of several years I wasn't expecting to gain too much from this book.

However, I was surprised to find lots of little gems scattered through the book which I know I can use to simplify some of my existing puppet modules.

The only negative, and the reason I didn't rate it with 5 stars is that it has absolutely no windows recipes. Now that Puppet is evolving to support Windows, some example code would definitely be of use to myself and others.

Please see http://www.packtpub.com/puppet-3-cook... for more detail

[Patrik Antonsson · Rating 5 out of 5]

With this book you get good tips and understanding how to solve common problems with puppet.
The book start from the beginning with setup of puppet and walks you through different problems configure different resources and end with monitoring and reporting.

This is a good book to have as reference during puppet development.

Got my book from http://www.packtpub.com/puppet-3-cook... so I have as both pdf and epub.

[Bonloplopgmail.com · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is very well-structured for the beginner to intermediate puppet and devops person.
Starts off with overview and goes thru step by step examples and problems with helpful
along the way. Using this book I was able to setup puppet and create recipes at my company.
Got a pdf version
http://www.packtpub.com/puppet-3-cook...