Applied Puppet for Infrastructure: Practical Configuration Management, Automation, and Scaling

Applied Puppet for Infrastructure: Practical Configuration Management, Automation, and Scaling is a hands-on guide to mastering Puppet for real-world infrastructure. It situates Puppet within the modern landscape of distributed systems and infrastructure as code, unpacking the platform's declarative model, agent/agentless architecture, and security posture so readers can design resilient, auditable deployments from day one. The book dives deep into Puppet's language and tooling, teaching advanced patterns for code reuse, strong type safety, custom functions, and resource management. You'll learn to build scalable, well-versioned modules with robust parameterization, apply roles-and-profiles-driven design, and adopt effective testing practices. A practical, in-depth treatment of Hiera shows how to model data, manage secrets securely, and deliver context-aware configuration across environments. Beyond code, the book addresses operating Puppet at scale: strategies for CI/CD, automated testing and validation, orchestrated code rollout, and scaling Puppet masters for large fleets. Coverage of compliance, auditability, disaster recovery, and integrations with multi-cloud, container, and event-driven workflows rounds out the text—providing the actionable insights and patterns infrastructure engineers need to automate, secure, and scale confidently.