Puppet is a configuration management software that allows the defining and enforcing of the desired state across your nodes and keeps them in this desired state. Nodes are the clients and servers that are connected to and managed by Puppet. Puppet supports both Linux and Windows environments. Also, it is available both commercially and in open source. In this book, we will deal only with the open source version.

However, you may also want to use or give Puppet Enterprise a go, which is the commercial solution. There is a virtual appliance available to download on the Puppet website https://puppetlabs.com/download-learning-vm. You can download and test it. It supports up to ten nodes for free. Of course, using the commercial version is easier as it has complete support and additional functionalities. The problem with it is that, you need to pay for it and have a budget. Following are the additional advantages, if you want to check the Enterprise Puppet. For more details, please check out the URL https://puppetlabs.com/puppet/commercial.

While reading books based on Puppet, we come across one little problem: the books are all about managing Linux systems. There are almost no resources explaining the details about managing Windows servers and clients. Thus, it was a challenge for me to use Puppet in the Windows environment. While doing this, I had to deal with many problems and learn the hard way. In this book, I will make it much easier for you to use Puppet for Windows. By the end of this book, you will have a solid understanding of how to write manifests for Windows and deal with the configuration problems. There will be practical step-by-step examples to complete the tasks. However, we will not delve much into technical and theoretical discussions. The book will show you one easy way of doing it. However, this does not mean that this is the only way to do it.

For example, we will use the Foreman web interface with Apache to manage hosts. This does not mean that this is the only way. You can use Puppet without any server and you can distribute the manifests with Git. This is called the masterless mode. You can only implement this with Apache and handle all the manifests from the terminal. You can also use the enterprise version. These are the perfectly possible ways of using Puppet, but may require more effort or money. The list of ways mentioned here is not exhaustive and every implementation method has not been covered. I have tried many ways and different usages, and came to the conclusion that using Foreman with Puppet is one of the easiest ways to start. This maximizes the benefits and minimizes the effort. However, this is subjective and some people may feel more comfortable without the graphical interface, or may switch to the enterprise version.