Book excerpt: 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