The Vox Pupuli community is awesome Many great minds with lots of ideas.
Puppet 8 for DevOps Engineers: a book that helps you understand the tool better Puppet is one of my main tools at work. Today, it helps us manage our office and retail infrastructure — more than 9,000 Linux hosts used for different business needs. Since the book itself is written in English, I decided to translate my post as well. There are not many up-to-date materials about Puppet in Russian, so I decided to read “Puppet 8 for DevOps Engineers” in the original language. It took more time than usual, but it was worth it. What I liked most is that this book is not just a collection of syntax examples. It explains Puppet as a complete engineering tool. The book starts with the history of Puppet and the problems it was designed to solve. Then it moves to the philosophy behind the tool: why it is built around a declarative approach, how idempotency works, and why it matters when managing infrastructure at scale. A large part of the book is dedicated to Puppet code. The author explains it through examples and practical advice, but also covers common mistakes, pitfalls, and legacy approaches from older versions that can still be found in real infrastructures, but should usually be replaced. I also liked the chapters about Puppet architecture, the server side, configuration, performance tuning, logging, monitoring, and operations. This makes the book useful not only for people who write Puppet code, but also for those who need to keep the whole system running in production. The final part briefly compares open source Puppet with the paid version. The author is quite honest here: many features can be built on top of the free version if you are ready to invest time and maintain them yourself. It also becomes clear that the author (David Sandilands) is not just a Puppet user, but someone deeply involved in its development. That explains the level of detail and the wide view across different parts of the tool. Overall, the book was useful from several angles: writing better Puppet code, understanding the architecture, and operating Puppet servers in real infrastructure. I wish more DevOps tools had books of this level. There is also a sad context: Puppet 8 seems to be the last familiar open source branch for many users. After changes from Perforce Puppet, new Puppet packages and binaries started moving toward a more closed distribution model. The community responded by developing OpenVox (Vox Pupuli), a fork that keeps much of the familiar Puppet structure, commands, and logic. So the story of this tool is probably not over yet. #Puppet #DevOps #Linux #IaC #OpenSource #ITbook #SRE #Automation #OpenVox #VoxPupuli