When I first started using Ansible, I had already implemented Puppet to help manage the stacks on the machines that I was managing. As the configuration became more and more complex, the Puppet code became extremely complicated. This is when I started looking at alternatives, and ones that fixed some of the issues I was facing.
Puppet uses a custom declarative language to describe the configuration. Puppet then packages this configuration as a manifest that the agent running on each server then applies.
The use of declarative language means that Puppet, Chef, and other configuration tools such as CFEngine all operate using the principle of eventual consistency, meaning that eventually, after a few runs of the ...
