Puppet: The Config Management Tool That'll Make You Hate Ruby

Puppet's a configuration management system that runs agents on your servers. These agents phone home to a central server every 30 minutes asking "what should I be doing?" The server looks at your Ruby-like manifest files and sends back a list of changes to make.

Been around since 2005, survived the DevOps revolution, and now lives under Perforce's corporate umbrella. Current version as of September 2025 is Puppet Enterprise 2025.5 released in August 2025. The community got pissed when they started locking down free access and announced major lifecycle changes dropping the LTS model in August 2026. The original creator Luke Kanies hasn't been involved for years.

Here's What You're Dealing With

Puppet Server sits in the middle and compiles your configs. It'll become your nemesis when SSL certs expire at exactly the worst moment - usually 3am on a Sunday when you're trying to sleep. The performance tuning guide is your bible once you hit scale.

Agents run on every box, phone home every 30 minutes asking "what should I be doing?" You'll spend a lot of time waiting during testing. Pro tip: puppet agent -t runs immediately, which you'll type about 500 times while debugging your first manifest.

Facter scans systems and reports back facts. Gets weird on containers sometimes - learned this debugging why our Docker nodes kept reporting the wrong IP addresses. The custom facts feature is useful once you figure out the Ruby syntax.

PuppetDB stores everything in PostgreSQL. Setup sucks absolute dick but the query API is actually useful once it's running. Want to know which servers have vulnerable Apache versions? PuppetDB can tell you. Want to set it up? Budget a weekend, three energy drinks, and prepare to question your life choices.

What Actually Happens During a Puppet Run

Agent wakes up every 30 minutes, connects via SSL (pray the certs work), and asks "what do you want me to do?" Facter scans the box and reports back system info. Master takes your Ruby-like manifest code and compiles it into a catalog - basically a todo list customized for that specific server.

Then the agent does the actual work: installs packages, edits config files, restarts services. If something breaks, you'll find out in the logs. If everything works, you'll still check the logs because you don't trust it yet.

During development you'll get sick of waiting 30 minutes between tests. That's when you discover puppet agent -t for immediate runs. You'll type this command approximately 1,000 times while learning Puppet, cursing every time it takes 3 minutes to tell you there's a missing comma.

Why People Use Puppet (Despite the Learning Curve)

The CIS benchmarks and compliance modules actually work well. If you need to prove security compliance, Puppet has decent pre-built policies.

Scales better than Ansible's SSH approach once you hit 100+ nodes. Multi-master setups handle thousands of servers without breaking a sweat (if configured correctly).

SSL everywhere by default. Certificate management is built-in but you'll spend more time debugging cert issues than actually configuring servers. Certificate troubleshooting becomes a skill you'll develop whether you want to or not. Welcome to the club.

The Pricing Shitshow (Updated September 2025)

Puppet used to be free.

Then Perforce bought it in 2022 and decided money was more important than community. Classic corporate acquisition playbook. Here's what you're looking at now:

Puppet "Core" (Free*)
*Free like "free" Windows

• requires registration, EULA acceptance, and stops working after 25 nodes.

Need to manage 26 servers? Time to open your wallet. No published pricing means they'll charge whatever they think your budget can handle.

Major Shit Coming August 2026: [End of LTS Support Model](https://groups.google.com/g/puppet-announce/c/g

Xjm0zbF418)

• No more Long Term Support (LTS) versions after August 2026
• New "Latest" and "Latest-1" model with 12-month cycles
• Current PE 2023.8.z LTS series dies August 2026 (final LTS ever)
• PE 2025.y becomes "Latest-1" in August 2026, dies August 2027
• Forced upgrade cycle every 24 months maximum

Puppet Enterprise (Pay to Play)

GUI that looks like it escaped from 2010 but gets the job done.

Role-based access control is actually useful if you have teams. Reporting works, compliance features exist. Pricing is whatever they think they can get away with

• expect $100-500 per node per year based on what other people report paying.

Puppet Enterprise Advanced (Maximum Corporate Buzzword Edition)

• "AI-powered features" (probably just better search)
• "Predictive infrastructure management" (monitoring with extra steps)
• Dedicated account manager (someone to blame when things break)
• If you have to ask the price, you can't afford it

The Puppet Forge Module Shitshow

Puppet Forge has ~7,000 modules.

Quality ranges from "actually useful" to "will break your infrastructure." Popular ones:

Modules that don't suck:

• puppetlabs/apache:

Apache management, works as expected

• puppetlabs/mysql:

My

SQL setup, decent documentation

• puppet/systemd: systemd service management
• cisecurity/cis_security_hardening:

CIS compliance baseline

Modules to avoid:

• Anything last updated more than 2 years ago
• Modules with no documentation or examples
• Random community modules with 3 GitHub stars
• Windows modules that promise too much

Pro tip:

Always check the module's GitHub repository for actual issues and recent activity before trusting it in production.

What Happened After the Perforce Acquisition

The Good:

Puppet still works. Existing installations didn't break. Enterprise customers got better support (if they paid for it).

The Bad:

• Binary downloads now require accepting a EULA
• 25-node limit enforced on free usage
• Community development slowed to a crawl
• Open source contributors got pissed and left

The Ugly:

• Community created OpenTofu fork (for Terraform) after HashiCorp's license change
• Similar community reaction to Puppet's changes on tech forums
• Multiple forks attempted, none gained serious traction yet
• Stack Overflow interest declining steadily

Real-World Integration Pain Points (War Stories Included)

Cloud Integration Nightmare Stories

AWS modules are always 6-12 months behind new services.

Spent 2 days debugging EKS node provisioning that kept failing with InvalidParameterValue: AMI ami-whatever-bullshit-id does not exist because the Puppet module was hardcoded to use some obsolete AMI that didn't exist.

AWS bill was over 2 grand that month instead of our usual few hundred because failed nodes kept spinning up like rabbits.

Azure modules feel completely abandoned. Resource group provisioning failed silently for 3 weeks

• Puppet reported success, Azure said nothing existed. Turns out the auth token expired and the module just... didn't check. ARM templates are frustrating but at least they scream when they break.

GCP modules are community orphanware. Cloud SQL module broke our staging database for 3 days because Google changed machine type naming from db-f1-micro to db-g1-small and the module couldn't handle it. Error message? "Invalid machine configuration"

• super helpful.

CI/CD Will Make You Hate Fridays

Jenkins plugin works until puppet-lint decides to shit the bed. Then your build dies with "ERROR: syntax error near line 42" which is fucking useless because line 42 is a comment.

Spent a whole Friday debugging some syntax bullshit that turned out to be a missing comma 300 lines away from where the error claimed it was.

Git

Lab CI integration is a nightmare of custom scripts that break every time you breathe on them. Official docs say "integrate with your existing pipeline"

• gee thanks, real helpful. You'll end up copying YAML from Stack Overflow, crossing your fingers, and wondering why you didn't just learn Docker instead.

GitHub Actions PDK integration randomly times out if you look at it wrong. 20-minute builds become 40-minute failures because some runner decided to take a nap. No error logs, just "runner timed out"

• fucking brilliant. Switched to smaller images and it magically worked, but I have no idea why.

rspec-puppet tests are a special kind of hell designed by someone who hates developers. Writing tests for a DSL that behaves differently based on node facts, OS versions, and apparently moon phases. Test passes locally, fails in CI, works in production. I've given up trying to understand why

• now I just run tests 3 times and take the majority vote.

Monitoring Integration:

• Prometheus module is solid, metrics endpoint works
• Grafana setup works, dashboard examples available
• ELK stack modules vary in quality, logstash integration exists
• Splunk integration costs extra money

Should You Still Use Puppet?

Yes, if:

• You already have it deployed and it works
• You manage 500+ servers and need compliance reporting
• Your security team mandates configuration management
• You can afford enterprise licenses

No, if:

• You're starting fresh with < 100 servers
• Your budget doesn't include per-node licensing
• You don't want to deal with agents and certificates
• You need fast deployment cycles

The community anger is real, but Puppet still manages infrastructure reliably if you can stomach the corporate bullshit and licensing costs.