From “What is Puppet?”:
Puppet is IT automation software that helps system administrators manage infrastructure throughout its lifecycle, from provisioning and configuration to patch management and compliance. Using Puppet, you can easily automate repetitive tasks, quickly deploy critical applications, and proactively manage change, scaling from 10s of servers to 1000s, on-premise or in the cloud.
Puppet is available as both open source and commercial software. You can see the differences here and decide which is right for your organization.
How Puppet Works
Puppet uses a declarative, model-based approach to IT automation.
- Define the desired state of the infrastructure’s configuration using Puppet’s declarative configuration language.
- Simulate configuration changes before enforcing them.
- Enforce the deployed desired state automatically, correcting any configuration drift.
- Report on the differences between actual and desired states and any changes made enforcing the desired state.
Topic maps seem like a natural for systems administration.
They can capture the experience and judgement of sysadmins that aren’t ever part of printed documentation.
Make sysadmins your allies when introducing topic maps. Part of that will be understanding their problems and concerns.
Being able to intelligently discuss software like Puppet will be a step in the right direction. (Not to mention giving you ideas about topic map applications for systems administration.)