Puppet, the popular configuration management tool, can get tricky at times. After a few months of using Puppet to manage our servers at work, a few practices have emerged as good, recommendable practices. I wanted to share a few of them with the rest of the world here so that beginners get a head start but also to get a good base for discussion with more seasoned Puppet users. Read more...

We’ve recently started using Puppet to provision our servers really seriously at work. All of our new servers are systematically provisioned using Puppet, and we now have a rule that nothing on servers can be changed by hand, every single bit needs to be managed by Puppet. Managing servers using Puppet is extremely useful and powerful, but you also need to know what you’re doing because a small untested change in your Puppet manifests could introduce instability (or worse! Read more...