Time is relative.

My future is your present.

When you read this, Puppet 4 has probably been released, largely based on the experimental features presented in Puppet 3.x releases, which we are going to review in this chapter.

Puppet 4 is a real (r)evolution.

New versatile and powerful features are going to stimulate smart implementations and very new approaches to the management of Puppet logic and data.

The grounds are being placed for future evolutions based on what we are seeing here.

Still, the familiar Puppet elements are all there; all the ones we have seen in the previous chapters: variables, resource types, nodes, modules, code and data to manage, plugins, integration with different devices, and so on. They are going to stay and evolve.

Most of the changes introduced as an experiment in the 3.x tree and enabled by default in Puppet 4 can be activated with the configuration option parser = future, so that they can be tested on Puppet 3 before trying a version switch...