Things change

Once we introduce a tool like Puppet in our infrastructure, everything changes and we should be well aware of this.

There's a wonderful term that describes what configuration management software like Puppet or Chef involve: Infrastructure as code; we define our IT infrastructure with formal code, the configurations of our servers, the procedures to set them up, whatever is needed to turn a piece of bare metal or a blank VM in to a system that provides services for our purposes.

When we can use a programming language to configure our systems, a lot of powerful collateral effects take place:

• Code can be versioned with an SCM: The history of our commits reflects the history of our infrastructure: we can know who made a change, when and why. There's a huge intrinsic value in this; the power of contextual documentation and communication. Puppet code is inherently the documentation of the infrastructure, and the commits log reflects how this code has been deployed and evolved. It quickly...