Puppet
ELI5 — The Vibe Check
Puppet is an old-school infrastructure automation tool that describes the desired state of your servers in a language called Puppet DSL. Like a puppet master pulling strings, it continuously checks your servers and corrects them if they drift from what you declared. It was huge in the 2010s before Ansible and Terraform took over.
Real Talk
Puppet is a declarative configuration management tool that uses a domain-specific language to define the desired state of infrastructure. Puppet agents run on managed nodes and periodically check in with a Puppet master to enforce configuration. It's considered a predecessor to modern IaC approaches.
When You'll Hear This
"The old datacenter runs on Puppet — we'll migrate when we move to cloud." / "Puppet ensures all servers have the same configuration even if someone changes them manually."
Related Terms
Ansible
Ansible is a tool that lets you automate the setup of servers by writing scripts called playbooks.
Chef
Chef is an older infrastructure automation tool where you write 'recipes' and 'cookbooks' to describe how servers should be configured.
IaC (Infrastructure as Code)
IaC is shorthand for Infrastructure as Code — the idea that your servers and cloud setup should be written in files, not clicked together in a UI.
Infrastructure as Code
ClickOps means building your cloud infrastructure by clicking buttons in AWS console.