Learning Path: Puppet: From Novice to an Expert Puppet User

Description

The challenges of IT infrastructures and the need to automate common activities has become the major requirements in many large organizations. Puppet is one such configuration management tool that allows to efficiently manage and automate all your IT infrastructure. If you’re a developer, a system administrator, or you are simply curious about learning Puppet, then go for this Learning Path. This Learning Path will help you to automate all your IT configurations and take control over what you do to each Puppet agent in a network, including when and how you do it.

Packt’s Video Learning Paths are a series of individual video products put together in a logical and stepwise manner such that each video builds on the skills learned in the video before it.

The highlights of this Learning Path are:

• An all-you-need-to-know guide for configuring a scalable and highly available Puppet infrastructure
• Develop the skills to run Puppet on single or multiple servers without hiccups

Let's take a quick look at your learning journey. This Learning Path gets you up-and-running with Puppet straightaway using real-world examples. You will learn to install and set up Puppet. You will then learn how to use different resource types available with Puppet, writing better manifests, handling dependencies, and using tags to gain more control with Puppet manifests. You will explore DSL, look at dependencies and how Puppet treats individual code blocks. You will also look at how you can manage Cron jobs and run arbitrary commands with Puppet.

Moving ahead, you'll take your Puppet knowledge to the next level by delving deep into concepts such as scaling the Puppet infrastructure, utilizing storeconfigs with PuppetDB, and using different external node classifiers. Get your hands dirty by running Puppet components in Docker containers, using Puppet to create Docker images, and running applications on Docker along with orchestration using Mcollective. Finally, you will learn how to write custom plugins for Puppet such as facts, resource types, providers, and functions.

By the end of this Learning Path, you'll have a solid understanding of Puppet and be a confident Puppet user.

Meet Your Expert:

We have combined the best works of the following esteemed author to ensure that your learning journey is smooth:

Toni Schmidbauer has been working with various Unix/Linux and BSD systems for the last 17 years. He started working with configuration management in 2005 with CFEngine 2 and switched to Puppet in 2010. Currently, he is responsible for a Puppet infrastructure containing around 2000 nodes running Solaris, AIX and Linux. When he's not writing Puppet code he likes to tinker with different programming languages and computers in general.

Anirban Saha is an infrastructure professional with more than six and half years' experience in infrastructure management at various industries and organizations ranging from early startups to corporate environments. He has worked extensively with configuration management and automation tools including Puppet, Chef, Ansible, Saltstack, and Terraform, to name a few. He has extensive experience in architecting, deploying, and managing large infrastructures. He speaks at various conferences on the latest technologies and is also the author of Salt Cookbook published by Packt Publishing.

What You Will Learn!

• Configure Puppet server infrastructures by using different methodologies and components
• Add features to achieve redundancy and optimize performance
• Deploy specific storage components for servers to ensure fast and reliable data delivery
• Write efficient Puppet code tests and ensure proper code delivery to the Puppet master servers
• Configure a highly available Puppet infrastructure along with storeconfigs and external node classifiers
• Understand configuration using Docker and Puppet along with orchestration using Mcollective
• Write custom plugins such as facts, resource types, providers and functions

Who Should Attend!

• This Learning Path is for those who are new to Puppet including system administrators and developers who are looking to manage computer server systems for configuration.
• However, if you have used Puppet before, you'll get a thorough grounding in all the latest features and techniques

TAKE THIS COURSE