Once you have more than a few servers you will go crazy if you don't have a good configuration management setup. The real advantage of using a tool like puppet over something home grown is that you can hire someone to come in and manage puppet who will be able to understand how your automation works without having to have your system admin sit down and explain the 1000 little arcane perl scripts that make everything work.
We use client-server puppet, but require all the updates to be manually run, which makes rollouts a little bit more deterministic and avoids the "Hey we just changed puppet and everything broke" effect.
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I just wanted to ++puppet.
Once you have more than a few servers you will go crazy if you don't have a good configuration management setup. The real advantage of using a tool like puppet over something home grown is that you can hire someone to come in and manage puppet who will be able to understand how your automation works without having to have your system admin sit down and explain the 1000 little arcane perl scripts that make everything work.
We use client-server puppet, but require all the updates to be manually run, which makes rollouts a little bit more deterministic and avoids the "Hey we just changed puppet and everything broke" effect.