Puppet Fundamental & Advanced Training — Enterprise Configuration Management at Scale

What This Course Covers

This comprehensive program combines Puppet fundamentals and advanced topics into a single, accelerated curriculum. From writing your first manifest through operating Puppet Server at enterprise scale with PuppetDB, code management, and reporting. The course includes Bolt for agentless orchestration and a dedicated modernization module covering Puppet→Ansible migration and Puppet + Terraform coexistence patterns.

Who Should Attend

• New DevOps engineers joining organizations with Puppet infrastructure
• Experienced Puppet users wanting to deepen enterprise operations knowledge
• Engineering managers overseeing Puppet modernization initiatives
• Teams managing large Puppet deployments in regulated industries

Learning Outcomes

• Write production-grade Puppet manifests with the role/profile pattern (fundamental)
• Design Hiera data hierarchies for multi-environment, multi-datacenter deployments (advanced)
• Operate Puppet Server with PuppetDB, Code Manager, and RBAC at scale (advanced)
• Use Puppet Bolt for agentless task orchestration across heterogeneous environments (advanced)
• Build CI/CD pipelines for Puppet module testing, promotion, and deployment (advanced)
• Plan Puppet modernization — Bolt expansion, Ansible migration, Terraform integration (modernization)

Course Modules

1. Puppet Architecture — Master-agent model. Catalogs. Facter. Declarative DSL philosophy.
2. Manifest Development — Resources, classes, defined types. Relationships. Ordering. Metaparameters.
3. Module Development — Module structure. Puppet Forge. Dependencies. PDK. Best practices.
4. Hiera Data Management — Hierarchy design. Data bindings. eyaml. Hash merging. Per-environment data.
5. Role/Profile Pattern — Designing composable profiles. Role abstraction. Pattern best practices.
6. Puppet Server Operations — Code Manager. Environments. Node classification. RBAC. PuppetDB. Reporting.
7. Puppet Bolt — Agentless architecture. Tasks vs. plans. Orchestration. Bolt + Puppet Server together.
8. Testing Puppet — PDK. rspec-puppet. Acceptance testing. CI/CD for Puppet modules.
9. Puppet at Scale — Compile masters. Load balancing. Tuning. HA. Disaster recovery. Monitoring.
10. CI/CD Integration — Jenkins + Puppet. Code Manager webhooks. Automated promotion. Impact analysis.
11. Modernization Strategies — Puppet + Terraform. Puppet→Ansible. Immutable infrastructure. When to evolve vs. replace.
12. Capstone: Enterprise Puppet — Operate a multi-environment Puppet deployment with CI/CD, Bolt orchestration, and modernization plan.

Hands-on Exercises (18 total)

Write modules using the role/profile pattern. Design a multi-environment Hiera hierarchy. Configure Puppet Server with Code Manager and webhook-driven deployment. Build Bolt plans for agentless task orchestration. Implement CI/CD for Puppet modules. Plan a Puppet→Ansible migration for a sample infrastructure.

Enterprise Use Cases

• Operating Puppet for 8,000+ servers across production, staging, and DR environments
• Using Puppet's built-in reporting for continuous compliance in a SOC 2 environment
• Modernizing Puppet operations with Bolt for cloud-native workloads while maintaining on-prem Puppet infrastructure

Related Courses

For modern alternatives, see Ansible Training. See also Puppet Training (shorter version) and Platform Engineering.