Puppet Concepts and Practices

This chapter will focus on the origins of Puppet, why it was created, and how it is used in DevOps engineering. It will look at Puppet’s approach to configuration management and how its declarative approach differs from more regular procedural languages. Puppet has many features that are common in other languages such as variables, conditional statements, and functions. But in this chapter, we will cover the key terms, structure, and ideas of the language that make it different and how the underlying platform runs. We will give a clear, high-level overview of its approach and how it relates to customer needs and infrastructure environments. Finally, as there are a lot of preconceptions regarding Puppet, this chapter will finish by addressing some of the most common ones, including where they come from, and unwrap them.

This should ensure a fundamental understanding of Puppet and its approach before we build up a deeper, technical understanding of the language in upcoming chapters. It will also ensure this book is not just about technology but how genuine value can be delivered to customers using the service that Puppet provides.

In this chapter, we are going to cover the following main topics:

• Puppet’s history and relationship to DevOps
• Puppet as a declarative and idempotent language
• Key terms in the Puppet language
• Puppet as a platform
• Common misconceptions