Puppet for dummies

Good informative talk. Not something I'm going to use, but hey ... got a t-shirt. :)

Well prepared & interesting talk, something to add to my todo list. Thanks for the shirt ;-)

Very interesting talk with good examples and practical advice. Joshua is a good speaker.

very interesting topic, good presentation and nice t-shirts! :)

I really got interested in puppet and definately am going to see if I can use it in some way. When the situation at the company I work for was described almost spot on at the beginning of the talk it really got my attention. I missed some practical issues about dealing with hosting companies and tools they use for maintaining their servers, even when they are dedicated. So telling people there really is no reason to not use something like puppet is simply not true.
The slide about the advantage of just having to say: "we need a webserver" instead of "apt-get install..." or any other variant is bogus. This advantage didn't seem to be one because later on it showed you still need the package name and a distinction between different types of OS. The adavantage really is to centrally manage multiple servers and being able to version it. These advantages could have been on this slide.
Excellent speaking style.

@Onno:

Not sure its the correct place to start the discussion, but anyway: It isn't really bogus if you will take a look how most of the puppet modules are build. Yes, *eventually* you tell the system which package it needs to install but from your point of view, this is irrelevant. You only need to tell it to install "apache", not httpd or apache2. A good example can be found in the "example42" modules: https://github.com/example42/puppet-apache
Mostly this is due to the fact that distributions tend to use different names of packages, or even use different layouts (/etc/httpd/ vs /etc/apache2 for instance).

The difference between "what" instead of the "how" is mostly visible in the resources and arguments themselves: when I tell a service that it needs to be enabled, I don't have to specify that is needs to do this through update-rc.d, chkconfig, manual installation in rc.x directories or another way. I let the agent take care of that.

Nice talk! Calm and clear. Surely I'm going to look into Puppet more!

Cleared up some misconceptions I had about Puppet. Also, free t-shirt.

nice talk, you know ;)
will definitely go and play with puppet this week and thanks for the t-shirt!