Puppet is designed to provide continual enforcement of an end-state on nodes in an infrastructure. While Puppet can cover most infrastructure tasks, some things are better left to ad hoc tasks. Puppet Tasks are on-demand actions that can be run on nodes and containers. You write tasks in a similar way to scripts, and they can be written in any language that's available on the target node. When deciding on the right tool for the job, between a task or a Puppet manifest, I stick to a simple thought process: is this something I want permanently, or a single one-off action?
Let's think about some things in a normal workplace that would be permanent, or stateful. The physical address of where I work and the building, rooms, and furniture are examples of physical things I'd want permanently enforced. Things like weekly meetings or the daily scrum would also be something to continually enforce, as a business rule. All of these things have components, from the brick and mortar to the...