This book is about you. Yes, you. Given that you have picked this up, you are likely responsible for managing computer systems. You may identify as a systems administrator, a devOps engineer, or a developer. You may identify as a scientist or just about any professional or amateur who relies on computers to do your job.

No matter what you call yourself, you probably spend too much time managing these computers. You’d like to get it done faster so you can focus on something else. You’d like to do it more consistently, so that you don’t have to chase down one-off problems in your reports. Or you’ve got some new demands that you’re looking for a way to solve. You will find MCollective to be one of the best tools in your toolbox.

This book will not be a heavy tome filled with reference material irrelevant to the day to day system administrator---exactly the opposite. Throughout this book we will never stray from one simple goal: We focus all our efforts on how MCollective can help you do something faster or better than ever before.

Chapter 1 discusses what MCollective does, how it works, and how it can orchestrate changes in your systems faster and easier than you’ve imagined before. Learn how MCollective is different from control systems that loop through each target, and how true parallel execution can benefit your environment.

The remainder of Part I will focus on getting you up and running with a working MCollective installation. You will learn the components that make up the MCollective infrastructure. You’ll install and configure each in a manner suitable for your specific environment. If you use Puppet, we’ll provide a MCollective module you can use to deploy MCollective throughout your environment in minutes.

This won’t be a test environment for training that doesn’t match your real concerns; instead you’ll perform real operations on your hosts. You’ll see how easy it is to deploy MCollective, and exactly how powerful the tools it provides are.

The second section Part II takes you on a nuts’n’bolts tour inside MCollective’s architecture, backbone, transport, and security controls. You’ll learn about using Network of Brokers to resolve multi-side or redundancy requirements. You’ll learn how to create and use collectives to handle thousands of MCollective agents spread around the world. After finishing this section, you’ll be able to fine-tune MCollective for your exact environment: small but globally diverse, immense in scale but localized, or a combination of both.

MCollective has an active developer and user community. Part III directs you to online repositories of clients and agents built by others, as well as concrete examples of how to use other’s plugins in your environment.

You will also create your own Server and Client plugins to perform any action you can conceive of. You’ll learn how to write scriptable clients, and how to write listeners to collect registration details from the agent systems. Best of all, the secrets of collecting and processing command responses using a directed reply will allow you to create self-healing systems.

Every example with IP addresses will include both IPv4 and IPv6 statements. If you’re only using one of these protocols you can ignore the other. MCollective will happily use any combination of them. More details about complex IPv6 setups will be covered in IPv6 Dual-Stack Environments.

Enough with the talking. There’s a lot to cover here, and we are all busy people. It is time we got started.