Getting Started with Puppet

Puppet is an IT automation system. If you need to install, configure, and update servers, then Puppet can help you tremendously. Instead of doing all of these tasks manually, you can tell Puppet to configure your servers for you.

Not only will Puppet free you from the drudgery of repetitive tasks, but you will also gain major benefits, such as consistency, reliability, speed of deployment, ease of recovery, and scalability.

Do you often have slightly different configurations on servers that are supposed to be identical? With Puppet, you’ll no longer have to figure out why something works on one server but doesn’t work on another one because Puppet will configure them in the same way. You’ll also have less downtime because there is less that can go wrong when everything is configured the way it’s supposed to be.

Do you always seem to be adding more servers? Provisioning servers is a breeze when Puppet already knows how to configure them.

This lesson will get you started on bringing these benefits to your network. It’s a hands-on lesson with exercises every step of the way to give you experience using Puppet. First, I will show you how to install Puppet on a virtual machine on your own desktop. Then you will use it as a test environment to learn how to write Puppet code to automate server configuration.

Learning Objectives

• Install Puppet server
• Use pre-built Puppet modules
• Use manifests, classes, resources, facts, nodes, and templates
• Create your own Puppet modules