Key concepts behind Puppet

Infrastructure-as-code

Puppet is built on the concept of infrastructure-as-code, which is the practice of treating infrastructure as if it were code. This concept is the foundation of DevOps — the practice of combining software development and operations. Treating infrastructure as code means that system administrators adopt practices that are traditionally associated with software developers, such as version control, peer review, automated testing, and continuous delivery. These practices that test code are effectively testing your infrastructure. When you get further along in your automation journey, you can choose to write your own unit and acceptance tests — these validate that your code, your infrastructure changes, do as you expect. To learn more about infrastructure-as-code and how it applies to Puppet, see our blog What is infrastructure as code?.

Idempotency

A key feature of Puppet is idempotency — the ability to repeatedly apply code to guarantee a desired state on a system, with the assurance that you will get the same result every time. Idempotency is what allows Puppet to run continuously. It ensures that the state of the infrastructure always matches the desired state. If a system state changes from what you describe, Puppet will bring it back to where it is meant to be. It also means that if you make a change to your desired state, your entire infrastructure automatically updates to match. To learn more about idempotency, see our Understanding idempotency documentation.

Agile methodology

When adopting a tool like Puppet, you will be more successful with an agile methodology in mind — working in incremental units of work and reusing code. Trying to do too much at once is a common pitfall. The more familiar you get with Puppet, the more you can scale, and the more you get used to agile methodology, the more you can democratize work. When you share a common methodology, a common pipeline, and a common language (the Puppet language) with your colleagues, your organization becomes more efficient at getting changes deployed quickly and safely.

Git and version control

Git is a version control system that tracks changes in code. While version control is not required to use Puppet, it is highly recommended that you store your Puppet code in a Git repository. Git is the industry standard for version control, and using it will help your team gain the benefits of the DevOps and agile methodologies

When you develop and store your Puppet code in a Git repository, you will likely have multiple branches — feature branches for developing and testing code and a production branch for releasing code. You test all of your code on a feature branch before you merge it to the production branch. This process, known as Git flow, allows you to test, track, and share code, making it easier to collaborate with colleagues. For example, if someone on your team wants to make a change to an application's firewall requirements, they can create a pull request that shows their proposed changes to the existing code, which everyone on your team can review before it gets pushed to production. This process leaves far less room for errors that could cause an outage. For more information on version control, see the GitHub guides Git flow and What is version control?.