Masterzen explains how to offload the job of Puppet static file serving onto Nginx, a small and performant web server, and also how to have Nginx cache the files. He also gives a recipe for configuring Nginx to cache the compiled catalogs for each machine, reducing some of the compute load on the Puppet server.

think it makes sense to use a tool like Puppet for the initial configuration of the OS and of the packages required by your application. When it comes time to deploy your application, I think a tool like Fabric is more appropriate.

So far, my biggest problem with Nagios has been finding the time to add new systems to it, figuring out what services to check, etc. It’s not a particularly difficult thing to do, but in the grand scheme of things, it was just something that always fell by the wayside in the drive to get more systems set up, deal with user problems, and put out the inevitable fires. That is, until recently.

How to set up continuous integration testing for Puppet manifests.

Excellent introduction to Puppet for cloud management by Jeff Wallace, featuring EC2 and Rackspace Cloud integration, Puppet classes, using Ruby logic in ERB templates, and inheriting node definitions to create identical configurations.

cucumber-puppet is the glue between cucumber and Puppet, allowing you to write behavioural tests, or features as cucumber calls it, for your Puppet manifest.

It’s been said that deploying Java apps is hard for Linux packages, but Puppet makes it very easy. This is only the tip of the iceberg—you can use the same tool to deploy mailservers and databases as well as appservers. It fits in well whether you have 20 machines or thousands. It’s agnostic to cloud vs physical hardware, and plays nicely in all places. The example that follows below is designed to be executed locally, though in a typical deployment, you’ll host it on a central server, called a puppetmaster, and then roll your configuration out to the nodes using puppet.

People complain that Puppet is non-deterministic. On a certain level that is like complaining that threads are non-deterministic. That’s the way the model works by design. If there is logic that depends on the order of execution, that code needs mutex/syncronization. Threads create issues, but they also solve some.

Great article on configuring the Puppet server to use Passenger and Apache, with a complete example vhost definition for puppetmasterd.

Setting up a staging environment for your modules, manifests and files on the puppetmaster. Test your modules, manifests, templates files and facts before deploying on production servers.