The journey to automation happiness is not one that happens overnight. Often times, the tasks ahead of you can seem daunting. However, there is a simple method that I use to approach such problems when they arise. Simply, start with your area of greatest pain. If you spend a lot of time reviewing logs on systems, then start using Puppet to implement centralized logging. If it's user and account creation, then start there.

The operations industry as a whole is beginning to embrace the concepts that were introduced in Japan after World War II. The description of the concepts often uses the word lean. There are several important concepts I will leave you with.

The first is Kata. Kata is the art of practicing something to obtain mastery. Growing up, you often did this in school, especially with math. As with those, you must practice your art to get better at it. As you engage in automating your environment with Puppet—either to make your life easier or to appease auditors, you will get better at it with practice. Do not be afraid to revisit the earlier code as you become better. Improving it, often times, can make new code development go faster.

The second and last concept I'd like to introduce is Kaizen. This is the concept of continuous improvement. You should consider your environments as never complete. You iterate on the work you've done to continuously improve. Perhaps as earlier, you started with centralized logging. As you iterate on it, you'll build improved grok patterns, dashboard, and other things that will make your environment better and easier to use and manage. Even in the simplest of environments, there is always room for improvement.

I hope that you learned a lot throughout the course of this book and it helps you move your environments forward. Go forth and automate!