Systems Configuration Management with Puppet

AARNet
Date: Tuesday 12 July 2011
Time: 1.30pm - 5.00pm

Puppet is a system administration framework, written entirely in Ruby and capable of scaling from managing symlinks and Subversion checkouts in your home directory up to managing networks of hundreds or thousands of machines. It reframes the management problem, talking about resources like users, hosts, and packages, instead of the contents of files like /etc/passwd and /etc/hosts.

Puppet handles translating these resources to the appropriate file contents or commands, using what is called "Providers" for supporting a given platform or application. This higher-level resource layer makes the management problem drastically easier, allowing you to focus on how to configure and manage your services, rather than the intimate details of each individual application or operating system.

This workshop will cover managing a system with puppet in a sustainable and scalable way, demonstrating how to migrate from a manually managed system configuration to puppet, and go right through to deploying a web application on a clean machine from the delegate’s laptop.

Attendees should have a basic understanding of Linux and the LAMP (Linux Apache Mysql PHP) stack, be familiar with common cli editors, and will need a laptop capable of running the Subversion versioning control system client.

Facilitators

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