DevOps is catching on, and Puppet is one of the hottest job skills in the IT world. If you work in systems administration, datacenter operations or a similar field (or want to), you should probably learn how to use Puppet.

Learning new enterprise IT skills has traditionally been difficult. You need a lab environment to test new tools. But thanks to virtualization and the cloud, it’s become much easier to create testing environments.

The Learning Puppet VM

Take the Learning Puppet VM, for example. It’s a CentOS VM for either VMware Fusion or VirtualBox and comes with Puppet Enterprise already installed.

Puppet for Apache Tutorial

Now that you have an environment, what are you going to use it for? Managing Apache servers is a common use case, so Akquinet’s managing an Apache server with Puppet tutorial is a good quick starting point.

Puppet Testing Tutorial

If you’re applying concepts from development to operations, then testing should be one of those concepts. If you’re pushing configurations out to hundreds of machines, the last thing you want is to push a broken configuration to all of them. So once you’ve got some ideas about how to use Puppet and what you want to use it for, you’ll want to check out Puppet Labs’ tutorial Verifying Puppet: Checking Syntax and Writing Automated Tests. From the introduction:

One of the issues that crops up when working with Puppet is ensuring that your manifests do what you expect. Errors are bound to happen. A missed brace can make a manifest not compile, or forgetting to include a module or set a variable may mean that running Puppet on the host fails to enforce the expected state. All in all, it would help to have some tools to make sure we’re writing valid code, that it does what it expects, and that if it doesn’t we catch it as soon as possible.

More

If you want to dive deeper, Puppet Labs’ documentation is the place to go. Also, Puppet Labs offers training all over the world.

If you liked this quick round-up, please let me know what other tools you’d like to know more about.