Summary

In this chapter, you learned how Puppet was created by Luke Kanies as a stateful language to ease the automation of the configuration management of servers. We learned how using this stateful approach provides a language more natural for describing user requirements for configuration management and reduces the complexity involved in more traditional procedural approaches.

We looked at an overview of the core language terms and components and how they are structured via roles, profiles, and modules. This structure offers a natural way to create customer offerings, technical stacks, and reusable technical modules.

We looked at how the states described in the language are then applied to hosts via Puppet runs, and from these runs, we examined how valuable audit and compliance information can be gathered and stored in PuppetDB. We discussed how code can be managed in environments to allow the gradual release of state changes in a managed way in logical groups of servers that suits your organization’s risk appetite and development structure.

The chapter discussed some misconceptions around Puppet along with the main themes of relevance, complexity, and flexibility. Puppet’s maturity and focus on IaaS make it less fashionable, but using patterns and modules developed by Puppet and the community allows you to use Puppet to its strengths and deliver automation and self-service configuration and compliance to customers. Ensuring clear boundaries and responsibilities so that Puppet can integrate with, and work alongside, other tooling and teams avoids clashes and allows others to interact with Puppet and gain the benefits.

In the next chapter, we will review the major changes that have taken place in Puppet since version 5 and in the latest version, 7. Recommendations of the tooling to use to create an effective development environment will be made, and the creation of lab environments will be outlined and demonstrated. Additional reference sites will be outlined to allow readers to continue their research and stay up to date with developments in Puppet. This will ensure that as we start on the technical details in the following chapters, you will have the capability to test and experiment in your own environment and follow up in more detail on your points of interest.