Puppet the company bills Puppet the automation tool as the de facto standard for automating the delivery and ongoing operation of hybrid infrastructure. That was certainly true at one time: Puppet not only goes back to 2005, but also currently claims 40,000 organizations worldwide as users, including 75 percent of the Fortune 100. While Puppet is still a very strong product and has increased its speed and capabilities over the years, its competitors, in particular Chef, have narrowed the gap.
As you might expect from the doyenne of the IT automation space, Puppet has a very large collection of modules, and covers the gamut from CI/CD to cloud-native infrastructure, though much of that functionality is provided through additional products. While Puppet is primarily a model-based system with agents, it supports push operations with Puppet Tasks. Puppet Enterprise is even available as a service on Amazon.
Puppet products
Current Puppet offerings include open source Puppet, Puppet Enterprise, Puppet Pipelines, Puppet Discovery, Puppet Bolt, Puppet Container Registry, and Puppet Forge. Open source Puppet, an automated administration engine for your Linux, Unix, and Windows systems, performs administrative tasks (such as adding users, installing packages, and updating server configurations) based on a centralized specification.
Puppet Enterprise adds orchestration features, a web console, and professional support to open source Puppet. It helps you scale automation broadly and deeply across your infrastructure and keep it compliant. Puppet Discovery discovers traditional infrastructure, cloud-native resources, and containers, and lets you bring them under management.
