Learning Path: Puppet: From Novice To An Expert Puppet User

Acquire the key skills of Puppet to effectively manage and automate your IT infrastructure

What you'll 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

Requirements

No prior programming or system administration experience is assumed

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.

Overview

Section 1: Learning Puppet

Lecture 1 The Course Overview

Lecture 2 What Is Configuration Management?

Lecture 3 Installing Puppet as a Client or Agent

Lecture 4 Creating and Applying Your First Puppet Manifest

Lecture 5 Getting Help from Puppet and Inspecting System Resources

Lecture 6 Managing Files, Directories, and Links

Lecture 7 Recovering Deleted Files

Lecture 8 Managing Packages

Lecture 9 Managing Services

Lecture 10 Understanding Metaparameters

Lecture 11 Learning ‘before’ and ‘require’

Lecture 12 Using ‘notify’ and ‘subscribe’

Lecture 13 Using exec for Executing System Commands

Lecture 14 Scheduling Commands with cron

Lecture 15 Modules

Lecture 16 Class Structure

Lecture 17 Module Best Practices

Lecture 18 Creating a NTP Module

Lecture 19 Understanding Templates

Lecture 20 NTP Class and Templates

Section 2: Advanced Puppet Techniques

Lecture 21 The Course Overview

Lecture 22 Load Balancing in Puppet Servers to Handle Scaling

Lecture 23 Creating a Centralized CA Server for Authentication

Lecture 24 Understanding Exported Resources and Configuring PuppetDB

Lecture 25 Exporting and Collecting in Modules using PuppetDB

Lecture 26 Using the PuppetDB API and Dashboard

Lecture 27 External Node Classification Using Scripts

Lecture 28 Node Classification Using Hiera

Lecture 29 Running Puppet server side components in Docker Containers

Lecture 30 Automating Docker Containers Using Puppet Agent

Lecture 31 Creating Docker Images

Lecture 32 Running Applications in Docker Using Puppet

Lecture 33 Configuring MCollective for Orchestration in Puppet

Lecture 34 Writing Custom Facts

Lecture 35 Writing Custom Resource Types

Lecture 36 Writing Custom Puppet Types

Lecture 37 Writing Custom Providers

Lecture 38 Writing Custom Functions

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