Learning MCollective: Parallel Server Management in Puppet and Chef

by Jo Rhett

Orchestrate change across server clusters in near realtime with MCollective, the framework that works in concert with Puppet, Chef, and other configuration management tools. Ideal for system administrators and operations or DevOps engineers at any level, this hands-on guide teaches you how to build and test a real installation of MCollective servers and clients in your environment.

Learn how to build an entire installation by hand, know where every configuration file lives, and understand every configuration parameter and what it means. Whether you manage a small environment or one that’s immense in scale, this book shows you how to orchestrate specific actions faster and better than you do now.

Tour MCollective’s architecture, backbone, transport, and security controls
Configure MCollective components to match your production environment
Create and use collectives to handle thousands of remote MCollective agents
Use ActiveMQ Network of Brokers to resolve multi-site or redundancy requirements
Learn how to use community-built client and agent plugins, with concrete examples
Create your own server and client plugins to perform a variety of actions
Learn recommended best practices for using MCollective

284 pages, Kindle Edition

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.