Time is relative.
My future is your present.
These two lines started this chapter in the first edition of this book, and as expected, lots of things have changed since then. Most of the features previously seen as future are already present and some of them are well consolidated. And, as with the first edition, some of the features we'll review here will be not the future, but the present of some of the readers of this book.
While writing this second edition, Puppet 4 has become a reality and we may not be seeing so many revolutionary changes and experimental features as we saw with the latest releases. The roadmap to the next Puppet releases aims more at improvements in existing features and to continue working on performance and on a more optimized codebase. These changes include full code rewrites to other languages, and changes in network protocols.
Puppet also has to respond to how the computing world is changing; everything is in the cloud now and containers...