Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Book review - Pulling Strings with Puppet; configuration mgmt made easy

Puppet is an amazing tool for keeping everything on a cluster in sync. I/we use it for apache cassandra, hadoop and our own internal software distribution. 
Its a short book but given the light level of documentation around the puppet opensource project I found this book useful to get you started automating machine administration. However, I realize now that I am using puppet more and more what holds it back is that its such a thin book it lacks complete examples. This is really a critical flaw. Maybe if it came with source code on a website this hole could be plugged. In the end I got a lot out of online tutorials and then used this book for reference/reminders. Eventually I've mostly moved past this book and I use the reference guides on the reductivelabs/puppetlabs website: 
http://docs.puppetlabs.com/references/stable/configuration.html
http://docs.puppetlabs.com/references/latest/type.html#package

Another annoyance is the lack of an index so I recommend the ebook.
Final comments: 

- Puppet is based on Ruby, so a light understanding of Ruby does help (especially if you need to patch puppet).
- I did have to patch my redhat 4 box's version of puppet that i got from epel yum repo since it was failing on templates and causing a SEGV in ruby. See http://projects.reductivelabs.com/issues/2604

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