Managing Infrastructure with Puppet

Throw Away the Handwritten Notebooks

Now that you’ve learned some Puppet and implemented an automation that does something useful, I’d like to talk about what it all means in the real world. Configuration management has been around for a long time, but its nature is changing. When we used to talk about configuration management, it involved checklists and difficult to test scripts. Often the policy documents regarding these topics were where 90% of the effort landed, and even those were not well adhered to. In the new structure that modern automation provides us, the system configuration can be treated like code. We can put it in version control, write functional testing suites for it, and QA it just like application releases. Configurations can have releases that relate to application code releases in meaningful ways, and bugs are easier to identify because we have explicit records of changes. So throw away the handwritten server log, and stop making cowboy changes to production servers. There is a better way.