Puppet provides system administrators with a really cool new way to manage multiple servers, and with the widespread acceptance of public and private cloud platforms such as Vmware vSphere, Amazon EC2, or Google Compute Engine, centralised management and provision of virtual servers has never been more important.
Managing an estate in this way allows IT Operations teams to adapt quickly to the needs of developers and business goals. It also provides a way to treat infrastructure as code, naturally bringing the world of Operations and Development closer together. In some circles, this New Way is known as 'DevOps'.
If you're interested in learning Puppet, there are many resources out there to help. Puppet Labs have clearly made a huge effort to produce useful and coherent documentation, which is supplemented by other sites such as the renowned puppet cookbook, not to mention numerous blog posts and articles by experienced Puppet users and prominent Puppet Labs employees.
Your humble author is an IT Consultant by trade, specialising in Linux systems and Internet-facing services. While working on setting up a Puppet Enterprise system for one of my clients, I wanted to build a platform which incorporated modern Puppet best practices while retaining enough flexibility to cope with future changes. Only time will tell whether or not that goal has been achieved, but I found during the design phase that there were a lot of decisions to be made, and very few complete end-to-end examples; there's a lot of good information out there, but I had to stitch together many different concepts to make the whole thing work the way we wanted it to.
This site serves as a record of that stitching process. It's currently work in progress (and I didn't begin with the intention of publishing, so please forgive any terrible stylistic inconsistencies and occasional dubious diagram), but I thought it may be helpful for others starting out on a similar journey to see the kind of decisions involved in setting up a useful configuration management platform.
Why "Puppet Lunch"? Well, I must admit to feeling a bit peckish when I came up with the name. And perhaps someone out there will find it pleasant to peruse the site for a little light lunchtime reading with their peanut butter sandwich.
I hope you find it at least a little bit helpful. If I've missed something obvious or Got It All Wrong, you're very welcome to get in touch, or submit a pull request on GitHub.
Happy reading!
Simon.
New Year's Eve 2013