A revolution is coming to IT operations. Configuration management tools can build servers in seconds, and automate your entire network. Tools like Puppet are essential to take full advantage of the power of cloud computing, and build reliable, scalable, secure, high-performance systems.The book takes you beyond the basics to explore the full power of Puppet, showing you in detail how to tackle a variety of real-world problems and applications. At every step it shows you exactly what commands you need to type, and includes full code samples for every recipe. The book takes the reader from a basic knowledge of Puppet to a complete and expert understanding of Puppet’s latest and most advanced features, community best practices, writing great manifests, scaling and performance, and how to extend Puppet by adding your own providers and resources.The book includes real examples from production systems and techniques that are in use in some of the world’s largest Puppet installations, including a distributed Puppet architecture and a high-performance Puppetmaster solution using Apache and Passenger.