The first time that I had come in touch with Puppet was, if I recall correctly, around the beginning of 2014. This was the time where I was looking for a tool that could support to automate reoccurring tasks in the configuration of my IT landscape. The primary idea was to do basic configuration only once on a server and have something scripted in place to automate it on the rest of the servers. The number of tools having things like this in scope was quite limited at this point and Puppet was the first one that had looked promising to me.
After I played a bit around with that tool it turned out, I can use it for much more. I can not only use it for the initial configuration of a single server but also for managing a complete IT landscape where I have the configuration drift under control and where I can also easily change for example the primary nameserver by only changing one variable.
As a consequence, I put my focus on developing Puppet modules instead of focusing on directly administrating the server landscape I was responsible for at this time. In the end, this change of the focus reduced the effort to effectively manage the IT landscape significantly. With the articles in this article series, I would like to share some of the experiences I had taken with that journey.