Configuration management has gone from something that few organizations practiced to a necessity. Today, every organization I visit is using configuration management in some form or another. The range of tools available has expanded as well. A few years ago, there were only two or three viable options for cross-platform configuration management. Now, there are many more options, including Salt, Chef, Ansible, and Puppet.
In the move to the cloud, it is important to be able to automate building nodes; manual tasks are no longer acceptable. Using Configuration management to automate the building of your nodes is now a requirement of the DevOps engineer.
This book takes you beyond the basics of Puppet and starts to explore the power of customizing Puppet to suit your needs. The book consists of mostly atomic recipes, which can be read independently to tackle a variety of real-world problems. The examples are structured so that you can dip in at any point and try out a recipe without having to work your way through the book from cover to cover. Code samples are included in each example. The book will take you from a rudimentary knowledge of Puppet to a more complete and expert understanding of Puppet's latest features and community best practices.
The open source version of Puppet was used throughout the book; you will not require Puppet Enterprise to complete the examples.
Puppet 5 is still changing rapidly, and I've included what I believe to be the most important parts of this release in this book. For up-to-the-minute information on the latest releases, I suggest you subscribe to the Puppet Developers mailing list at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/puppet-dev, the Puppet Slack Channel at https://slack.puppet.com/, and the puppetlabs blog at https://puppet.com/blog.
