Puppet

Puppet is a configuration management tool that lets you define the desired state of your servers, networks, and applications in code. Instead of writing shell scripts to set up each machine, you write Puppet manifests that describe what software should be installed, what services should be running, and what files should exist. Puppet then enforces that state across your entire fleet, detecting and correcting drift automatically. It supports both agent-based and agentless modes, with a master-server architecture or a standalone Puppet apply workflow. The tool runs on Linux, Windows, and macOS, and integrates with cloud providers like AWS and Azure, as well as monitoring systems and CI/CD pipelines. Puppet's module ecosystem on the Puppet Forge gives you thousands of pre-built configurations for common tasks. The company behind it is Puppet (formerly Puppet Labs), founded by Luke Kanies in 2005. Puppet is especially useful for organizations that need to manage hundreds or thousands of nodes with consistent, auditable policies, and it pairs well with tools like Terraform for provisioning and Ansible for orchestration.