Book excerpt: Acquire skills to manage your IT infrastructure effectively with Puppet About This Book Breeze through Puppet 4's key features and performance improvements to bring real advantage to your IT infrastructure Discover Puppet best practices to help you avoid common mistakes and pitfalls Blitz through easy-to-follow examples to get to grips with Puppet and succeed with everyday IT automation Who This Book Is For If you're an experienced IT professional and a new Puppet user, this book will provide you with all you need to know to go from installation to advanced automation in no time at all. Get a rapid introduction to the essential topics and then tackle Puppet for advanced automation. What You Will Learn Write and employ individual Puppet manifests Understand how Puppet implements system abstraction Deploy the Puppet master and agents Leverage and extend Facter to summarize your systems Create modular and reusable Puppet code Extend your code base with publicly available Puppet modules Use the modern features of Puppet 4 Separate logic from data using Hiera In Detail Puppet is a configuration management tool that allows you to automate all your IT configurations, giving you control over what you do to each Puppet Agent in a network, and when and how you do it. In this age of digital delivery and ubiquitous Internet presence, it's becoming increasingly important to implement scalable and portable solutions, not only in terms of software, but also the systems that run it. The free Ruby-based tool Puppet has established itself as the most successful solution to manage any IT infrastructure. Ranging from local development environments through complex data center setups to scalable cloud implementations, Puppet allows you to handle them all with a unified approach. Puppet 4 Essentials, Second Edition gets you started rapidly and intuitively as you'll put Puppet's tools to work right away. It will also highlight the changes associated with performance improvements as well as the new language features in Puppet 4. We'll start with a quick introduction to Puppet to get you managing your IT systems quickly. You will then learn about the Puppet Agent that comes with an all-in-one (AIO) package and can run on multiple systems. Next, we'll show you the Puppet Server for high-performance communication and passenger packages. As you progress through the book, the innovative structure and approach of Puppet will be explained with powerful use cases. The difficulties that are inherent to a complex and powerful tool will no longer be a problem for you as you discover Puppet's fascinating intricacies. By the end of the book, you will not only know how to use Puppet, but also its companion tools Facter and Hiera, and will be able to leverage the flexibility and expressive power implemented by their tool chain. Style and approach This quick learning guide for Puppet follows a practical approach, starting with some basic commands that you can use from the shell right away. It comprises a series of examples that will get you familiar with the most important aspects of Puppet in a flash.