Puppet is a tool that offers a world of order, control, and automation; we have learned it, we know at least the basics of how it works, and we want to install it on our servers.

We might have just a few dozens or several thousands of systems to manage. They might be similar to or very different from one another and have very few things to be configured, or a large number of resources to deal with.

We might manage them manually or maybe already have some automation scripts or tools, Puppet itself included, that help us in installing and maintaining them. We might need to optimize, refactor, and fix solutions that operate in a suboptimal way.

We might have a brand new project to build, and this time, we want to do the right thing and automate it from the beginning.

The number of variables here are many. Every snowflake is unique, but there's a basic and crucial distinction to make; it defines where our work will be done: