Alessandro Franceschi

The moment I knew that Alessandro Franceschi had written a book about puppet, I ordered it immediately. Being a hardcore puppet user, with nearly a thousand nodes controlled by this system and a huge codebase comprising hundreds of modules, the author of the Open Source modules Example42 (https://github.com/example42) had help us maintaining coherency and scaling our infrastructure even when tied to older puppet versions. The modules written by Alessandro, and the rest of the community, were clearly designed by somebody that had been through the same problems that we had when working with puppet at scale.
The book, far from being centered on the DSL or the system basic operations, goes through all the rationale behind these advanced modules, code patterns commonly used, and even high level architectural decisions. The book, admittedly biassed by the author experience managing puppet infrastructures, offers several real-world solutions to challenges like complex stacks (OpenStack), or the “reusable role” problem.
While some of these pearls can be found around, the author offers a great compendium of design choices and problem solutions, usually pointing to other internet resources or authors. Even when just the chapters dedicated to data driven architectures, module design, and puppet architectures just make the book a must, some additional chapters dedicated to puppet performance and scaling, ruby puppet extensions (plugins, faces, facters…) and a sneak peek of changes in Puppet 4, make it perfect a reference when facing puppet on complex environments. Clearly a book from a puppet practitioner for puppet practitioners and architects.… (more)