关于作者

John Arundel is a consultant engineer who helps people build better infrastructure. He uses automation and configuration management to make computer systems cheaper, faster, and more reliable. Formerly a senior enterprise systems engineer in the hosting division of US telco Verizon, he now runs his own company, Bitfield Consulting, and says he has never worked so hard in his life, or for less money.

Over the years John has worked with clients in the advertising and media industry, software, finance, retail, logistics, and even the emergency services, advising on architecture, automation, security, backups, resilience, performance, capacity planning, and regulatory compliance. He has been a member of the Puppet community since its earliest days, and organizes regular local sysadmin meetups and social events.

John holds a B.Sc.(Hons) in Computer Science, with a research interest in kernel resource scheduler design, and is a certified Sun Solaris administrator, LPI (Linux Professional Institute) graduate, and a member of the British Computer Society (MBCS). He is security-cleared to work on computer systems for the UK nuclear industry, which is probably nothing to worry about.

He has also worked as a software developer, both professionally and for the fun of it, contributing to several open source projects, and building a high-performance research chess engine. He blogs regularly at http://bitfieldconsulting.com on Puppet and system administration topics, is usually to be found on Twitter (@bitfield) complaining about things, and often speaks at technical user groups and conferences.

In his negligible spare time, John enjoys repairing Land Rovers, playing Go, and barbecuing. He lives in London and Cornwall.

My thanks go to Luke Kanies and the team at Puppet Labs; also to Ken Barber, Lindsay Holmwood, Gary Larizza, Stephen Nelson-Smith, R.I. Pienaar, Julian Simpson, Jordan Sissel, Cosimo Streppone, James Turnbull, and Dean Wilson, who all provided valuable contributions to the book, whether they know it or not; and for their brave self-sacrifice in the cause of proofreading, Ian Chilton, Kris Buytaert, Stefan Goethals, and Martin Brooks. A special mention goes to the regulars of channel #puppet, who often helped out when things didn’t work the way they were supposed to, which was virtually all the time.