Examining potential scenarios and approaches
Puppet is a tool that offers a world of order, control, and automation; we have learnt it, we know at least the basics of how it works and we want to install it on our servers.
We might have just a few dozens or several thousand systems to manage, they might be mostly similar or very different from one another, have very few things to be configured or a large number of resources to deal with.
We might manage them by hand or, maybe, already have some automation scripts or tools, Puppet itself included, that help us in installing and maintaining them but do that in a suboptimal way that we want to fix.
We might have a brand new project to build and this time we want to do the right thing and automate it from the start.
The number of variables here are many, every snowflake is unique, but there's a first basic and crucial distinction to make; it defines where our work will be done:
On a brand new servers infrastructure
On existing systems, either managed...
