We will talk about what configuration management is, trends in the industry that show why you would be crazy to not be using it, some talk of DevOps and finally how SUNY Geneseo has started to use Puppet in practice.
Puppet is configuration management software that lets you define a state for a computer and ensure it is in that state on every run. After about a year and a half of implementing puppet on our campus we had a working code base but it was not organized well and was hard to modify and extend. We refactored it to something much more in line with best practices. I will share what puppet it is, how it is useful and, most importantly, what we learned over 3 years of implementing it on our campus.
