With the ever-increasing challenges of IT infrastructures, it's no surprise that IT professionals are looking for ways to automate as much as possible! The need to automate common activities has become the major requirements in many large organizations. Puppet is one such configuration management tool that allows to efficiently build, manage and automate all your IT infrastructure efficiently! If you’re a developer, a system administrator, or you're simply curious about learning Puppet, then go for this Learning Path!

This comprehensive 4-in-1 course is a comprehensive guide, filled with quick step-by-step instructions that will help you automate your IT infrastructure with the latest techniques in Puppet! Initially, you’ll get a run-through of the strategies and patterns to introduce Puppet automation. Write custom plugins for Puppet such as facts, resource types, providers, and functions. Also, Deploy configuration files and templates at superfast speeds and manage user accounts and access control appear like a cakewalk. Finally, automate your IT infrastructure with Puppet.

By the end of the course, you’ll become a pro with Puppet 5 by automating your IT infrastructure with the latest techniques!

This Learning Path takes a practical approach with step-by-step recipes to conduct effective penetration testing using the powerful Kali Linux! At the very beginning, you’ll develop your skills using attacks such as wireless cracking, Man-in-the-Middle, and Denial of Service (DOS). Also, explore tools such as Metasploit, Wireshark, Nmap, and much more to detect vulnerabilities with ease! Finally, you’ll master all phases in a typical penetration testing project focusing on relevant Windows tools and techniques.

By the end of the course, you’ll be one step ahead of hackers by discovering and patching your network vulnerabilities as well as performing professional-level web penetration testing!

Contents and Overview

This training program includes 4 complete courses, carefully chosen to give you the most comprehensive training possible.

The first course, Puppet 5 – From Beginner to Pro, is a practical guide with the latest features of Puppet 5. This course teaches you how to install packages and config files, create users, set up scheduled jobs, provision cloud instances, build containers, and so much more. Every example in this course deals with something practical that you're likely to need in your work, and you'll see the complete Puppet code that makes it happen, along with step-by-step instructions on what to type and what output you'll see.

The second course, Puppet Configuration Management, covers Puppet to automate all your work! In this course, you will be introduced to Puppet development and learn how to set up your own private development environment, so that you can develop your code without fear of hurting live environments. From there on out we get familiar with the Puppet DSL and then deploy our code to a puppet server and puppet node like you would in a production environment. After completing this class you should have all the handles you need to start utilizing puppet and know how to further progress and become a true Puppeteer!

The third course, Puppet Techniques for Enterprise Deployments, covers Automating your IT infrastructure with the latest techniques in Puppet! This video course will begin by covering methods of reporting with Puppet and configuring various types of open source dashboards along with procedures to use report processors and create custom ones. You will then exploit PuppetDB to configure and create efficient Puppet reports and also to monitor Puppet changes and alert based on the same. Finally, you will learn about how to implement Nagios based monitoring using Puppet. Towards the end of the video course, you will concentrate on Puppet security. You will also learn about procedures to secure the Puppet deployments and methods to harden infrastructure using community modules. Finally, we’ll learn how to debug errors in the Puppet environment.

The fourth course, Advanced Puppet Techniques, covers writing custom plugins for Puppet such as facts, resource types, providers, and functions. This video course starts with taking your Puppet knowledge to the next level by delving deep into concepts such as scaling the Puppet infrastructure, utilizing storeconfigs with PuppetDB, and using different external node classifiers. You’ll then get your hands dirty by running Puppet components in Docker containers, using Puppet to create Docker images and running applications on Docker along with orchestration using Mcollective. At the end of the course, you will learn how to write custom plugins for Puppet such as facts, resource types, providers, and functions.

By the end of the course, you’ll be able to automate your IT infrastructure with ease with the latest techniques in Puppet!

About the Authors

• John Arundel is a DevOps consultant, which means he helps people build world-class web operations teams and infrastructures and has fun doing it. He was formerly a senior operations engineer at global telco Verizon, designing resilient, and high-performance infrastructures for major corporations such as Ford, McDonald's, and Bank of America. He is now an independent consultant, working closely with selected clients to deliver web-scale performance and enterprise-grade resilience on a startup budget. He likes writing books, especially about Puppet (Puppet 2.7 Cookbook and Puppet 3 Cookbook are available from Packt). He also provides training and coaching on Puppet and DevOps, which, it turns out, is far harder than simply doing the work himself. Off the clock, he is a medal-winning, competitive rifle and pistol shooter and a decidedly uncompetitive piano player. He lives in a small cottage in Cornwall, England and believes, like Cicero, that, if you have a garden and a library, then you have everything you need. You may like to follow him on Twitter at @bitfield.

• Toni Schmidbauer has been working with various Unix/Linux and BSD systems for the last 17 years. He started working with configuration management in 2005 with CFEngine 2 and switched to Puppet in 2010. Currently, he is responsible for a Puppet infrastructure containing around 2000 nodes running Solaris, AIX, and Linux. When he's not writing Puppet code he likes to tinker with different programming languages and computers in general.

• Anirban Saha is an infrastructure professional with more than seven and half years' experience in infrastructure management at various industries and organizations ranging from early startups to corporate environments. He has worked extensively with configuration management and automation tools including Puppet, Chef, Ansible, Saltstack, and Terraform, to name a few. He has extensive experience in architecting, deploying, and managing large infrastructures and speaks at various conferences on the latest technologies.