Learning MCollective: Parallel Server Management in Puppet and Chef

by Jo Rhett

The MCollective system administration toolset for parallel task execution is strategically intertwined with Puppet—so much so that Puppet Labs has encouraged users to deploy MCollective for ad-hoc control of their puppet hosts. Unfortunately, very little documentation on MCollective is available. Learning MCollective fills this critical gap.

With MCollective, you can build server orchestration or parallel job execution systems that enable real-time discovery of network resources. This book shows system administrators and operations engineers how to:


Break free from complex naming conventions for hostnames as a means of identity, using a rich set of meta data provided by each machine
Use meta data from Puppet, Chef, Facter, Ohai, or plugins you provide yourself
Call remote agents, using simple command line tools
Write custom reports about your infrastructure
Manage packages, services, and other common components using agents
Write simple RPC-style agents, clients, and web UIs in the easy-to-understand Ruby language

284 pages, Paperback

First published June 22, 2014

About the author

Jo Rhett is a DevOps/Site Reliability engineer with 25 years of experience conceptualizing and delivering large-scale Internet services. He creates automation and infrastructure to accelerate deployment and minimize outages. Jo's technical books focus on practical, hands-on advice and best practices.

Jo also has a few pieces of published short science fiction.