Puppet is a popular open-source server management solution written in Ruby, in use by organizations around the world to manage their computers more cheaply, more effectively, and with a higher quality of service.

Puppet is one of the easier infrastructure tools you'll ever use but it's still helpful to have a hands-on introduction to how to get started. This tutorial will provide just such an introduction. The tutorial glosses over the deep technical details to allow you to focus on doing useful work as soon as possible.

In the course of the tutorial you'll be exposed to most of the tools and configuration you would use in a functioning Puppet installation. By the end of the tutorial we'll produce a simple Puppet architecture that can manage a few key services and applications. We'll also demonstrate some of the more interesting problems Puppet simplifies solving