Orchestrate change across server clusters in near realtime with MCollective, the framework that works in concert with Puppet, Chef, and other configuration management tools. Ideal for system administrators and operations or DevOps engineers at any level, this hands-on guide teaches you how to build and test a real installation of MCollective servers and clients in your environment. Learn how to build an entire installation by hand, know where every configuration file lives, and understand every configuration parameter and what it means. Whether you manage a small environment or one that's immense in scale, this book shows you how to orchestrate specific actions faster and better than you do now. Tour MCollective's architecture, backbone, transport, and security controls Configure MCollective components to match your production environment Create and use collectives to handle thousands of remote MCollective agents Use ActiveMQ Network of Brokers to resolve multi-site or redundancy requirements Learn how to use community-built client and agent plugins, with concrete examples Create your own server and client plugins to perform a variety of actions Learn recommended best practices for using MCollective

If you maintain or plan to build Puppet infrastructure, this practical guide will take you a critical step further with best practices for managing the task successfully. Authors Chris Barbour and Jo Rhett present best-in-class design patterns for deploying Puppet environments and discuss the impact of each. The conceptual designs and implementation patterns in this book will help you create solutions that are easy to extend, maintain, and support. Essential for companies upgrading their Puppet deployments, this book teaches you powerful new features and implementation models that weren’t available in the older versions. DevOps engineers will learn how best to deploy Puppet with long-term maintenance and future growth in mind. Explore Puppet’s design philosophy and data structures Get best practices for using Puppet’s declarative language Examine Puppet resources in depth—the building blocks of state management Learn to model and describe business and site-specific logic in Puppet See best-in-class models for multitiered data management with Hiera Explore available options and community experience for node classification Utilize r10k to simplify and accelerate Puppet change management Review the cost benefits of creating your own extensions to Puppet Get detailed advice for extending Puppet in a maintainable manner

If you're a system administrator, developer, or site reliability engineer responsible for handling hundreds or even thousands of nodes in your network, the Puppet configuration management tool will make your job a whole lot easier. This practical guide shows you what Puppet does, how it works, and how it can provide significant value to your organization. Through hands-on tutorials, DevOps engineer Jo Rhett demonstrates how Puppet manages complex and distributed components to ensure service availability. You'll learn how to secure configuration consistency across servers, clients, your router, and even that computer in your pocket by setting up your own testing environment. Learn exactly what Puppet is, why it was created, and what problems it solves Tailor Puppet to your infrastructure with a design that meets your specific needs Write declarative Puppet policies to produce consistency in your systems Build, test, and publish your own Puppet modules Manage network devices such as routers and switches with puppet device and integrated Puppet agents Scale Puppet servers for high availability and performance Explore web dashboards and orchestration tools that supplement and complement Puppet