Mastering Puppet

Just having many problems following the examples which is not the books fault. Perhaphs not as clear as I would like it to be. Now working on deploying puppet 4.x and would like to see an updated version.

This book has given me a lot of insight on how to resolve many issues using puppet.

Bought this after reading reviews on amazon but not as impressive book. Just using it as reference for now.

An unstructured sales-document of the enterprice version only

I use it. Well written and just enough over my head that I can learn something.

Well written, has lots of good ideas/techniques for more advanced puppet users

A very few people know that Puppet was released more than 10 years ago. Only recently, with the explosion of the cloud and the Internet of Things, having infrastructures able to scale out, deploying machines that self-configure themselves, that feeble buzz became a powerful roar and configuration management tools emerged as an indispensable tool in the belt of any DevOps populating planet Earth. Among the many flavors we can pick from, Puppet, which recently reached version 4, is a mature and solid choice. Still, the shelves of the book stores only provide a limited amount of titles to feed the hunger of knowledge of the many Puppetteers out there, who are often forced to spend the day either on the IRC support channel or browsing Stack Overflow. Mastering Puppet, which covers the previous version of Puppet, is an excellent companion for any experienced Puppetteer looking for a discussion on advanced topics.Before discussing the content of the book, as stated above, it is very important to make it crystal clear that Mastering Puppet does not cover Puppet 4, but the previous version of the software, that is 3. Significant non backward compatible changes were made to both the language and its configuration. While, as I will discuss in a moment, the book is still very valuable, it does require the reader to be aware of it and, mainly, to be already aware of what changed and thus, what, of the topics discussed by the author, no longer apply to the current stable version of Puppet. On the other hand, it is also true that many companies are waiting a bit longer before switching to Puppet 4, mostly because their code need to be refactored and also because tools, such as Foreman, are still being ported.As mentioned when introducing this review, Mastering Puppet, as the title suggests, does cover advanced topics. The reader is expected to know how to properly configure Puppet and write his own classes and modules. Concepts such as types and providers are supposed to be known. So, rather than introducing the language features and the basic commands to get started, the author focuses on topics such as deploying Puppet either as a master/slaves or masterless.The first chapter, for example, does exactly this. Not only does the author show both approaches, with their pros and cons; he also discusses how the scenario changes when the number of nodes significantly increases, making it impossible for a single master to take care of the whole infrastructure. While the differences of the different approaches can be already known to the reader, what I find interesting here is the approach of the author: presenting different solutions to a problem, taking into account scalability. What are the options? When is this solution better than the other? Why?As stated several times already, the book covers Puppet 4. This new version of Puppet strongly relies on Hiera as an external source of data. This means that, for example, chapter 2, which covers different strategies to organize the data, is somehow outdated, now. Still, the chapter is worth the read, not only because there are many infrastructure still relying on Puppet 3, but also because it is very informative to see how the author presents and compares different solutions to that common problem. Something similar happens in chapter 3, which is about environments. Puppet 4 enforces environments, but these pages are still very worth a read. Here the author presents different approaches to exploit environments to organize the data: a single hierarchy with the environment as a hierarchy item; and multiple hierarchies where the path to the hieradata comes from the environment setting itself.Among the other topics covered are reporting, where the author presents Syslog, IRC, Foreman and the Puppet Dashboard; and exported resources. Exported resources and puppetdb, which are part of chapter 8, are one of the concepts that I have particularly enjoyed reading. The examples presented by the author are clear and easy to follow and the concepts are concisely and exhaustively discussed.On top of all of this, throughout the book we find plenty of small boxes with tips to get the most out of a concept just discussed or to avoid common pitfalls. If I have to find something negative about this book, well, I could complain that chapter 9, which is about design patterns and roles, was too short. That is a very complex and important topic that, probably, deserves a book on its own.Overall, an excellent book. I am very happy with it. Despite being outdated, it still delivers much to any Puppetteers looking for material covering advanced topics. Definitely a suggested read.

This book can be specially helpful for those starting (some Puppet knowledge is recommended) or those who have already taken the first steps implementing Puppet as the author, Thomas Uphill, walks through many useful topics, like scalability, types/providers, reporting, exported resources, etc.Through all the book, the topics are well explained and with a strong hands-on approach which I really appreciated, as it can be taken as an starting point to improve the reader's knowledge about Puppet's ecosystem.Sometimes, the reader really needs to keep in mind what the chapter is really about, as it easy to think that some topics are not explained deeply enough but if the chapter is about reporting, then the topic is not Puppet dashboard or the Foreman, they are just mentioned as tools for the reader to get an idea on how to make use of their reporting facilities.For the more experienced reader, there are always new tricks to be learned. I personally found some topics explained in a very detailed way and as I haven't started to implement them in a production environment, it's always good to know what and how other people is using them.