43 engineers on Hacker News describe using Puppet first-hand: 6 endorse it, 12 regret it, 2 are mixed.
“we replaced a mix of push-based Ansible, Salt, and Puppet with a fully pull-based Ansible system that solved most of the problems”
regret · production · skywhopper · 2025-11-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I lost a chunk of my life writing 'dockerctl' and a bunch of puppet code that deployed it so it could manage docker containers as systemd services.”
regret · production · raffraffraff · 2024-11-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I was a Puppet / Chef engineer for 8 years, never again.”
regret · production · 8 yr · ic0n0cl4st · 2021-03-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“had used chef/puppet in bits and pieces before and was never that keen on them”
regret · personal · mijoharas · 2020-11-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Puppet agent setups have been painful fro us so we switched to Ansible.”
regret · production · simonh · 2019-04-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we have also run into really bad things in our puppeted infrastructure that we run on vms and manage with terraform”
regret · production · markbnj · 2018-05-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Admittedly I've only used it and Puppet... and puppet is better aimed at large/complex infrastructure environments.”
endorse · production · vacri · 2015-07-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We switched away from puppet towards Salt... Our deployment runs on puppet took some 15min, salt handles them in 30s.”
regret · production · sergiosgc · 2014-01-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“using puppet apply ... was far superior to using puppet server (which we use for production). Maintaining usable certificates, sharing them with other devs... was far too much work”
regret · production · jsmeaton · 2013-12-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“after using them both on earlier projects, we started looking for something else that could do orchestrations as well as provisioning”
regret · production · ermintrude · 2013-11-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“That's the main reason we've switched over from Puppet to Ansible. It has less abstraction layers”
regret · production · gwillem · 2013-11-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I have used Puppet in production in my 2 previous jobs and ... puppet has tried to make something better but ... make other things way more too complicated than needed.”
regret · production · djatlantic · 2013-11-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“If you just use a vanilla AMI and do all of your configuration on boot, autoscaling takes a long time, so we use Puppet”
endorse · production · mryan · 2013-01-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“once you do get your base packages set up along with Puppet, you hardly have to think about dependencies at all.”
endorse · production · orthecreedence · 2012-09-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“thanks to puppet it's really easy to admin.”
endorse · production · 3 yr · Deadsunrise · 2012-02-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Largest puppet deployment is ~70 hosts... Puppet language offers slightly more rope to hang yourself on the foot.”
mixed · production · moe · 2011-10-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Once you finally have something up and running puppet feels much more predictable and 'solid' than chef... you will hate puppet every time you have to make a complex change.”
mixed · production · moe · 2011-10-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“thanks to the ease of doing this upgrade on several nodes with Puppet I couldn't help myself.”
endorse · production · uggedal · 2010-12-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use a Puppet to configure our systems. Perosonally though, I have found Puppet to have an exceptionally steep learning curve”
regret · production · adamcharnock · 2010-10-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've used Puppet in production (and been very happy with the results), but only looked at Chef.”
endorse · production · kylecordes · 2010-03-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I was a contributor to Puppet and standardized on it in my company.”
neutral · production · jasongill · 2025-05-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“the versions of Puppet, NTPd, Samba, and so forth that we use for all our Vagrant-ified infrastructure.”
neutral · production · manicdee · 2021-12-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've had similarly complicated problems with Terraform, Ansible, Chef and Puppet and just plain Linux as I have had with Kubernetes.”
neutral · personal · cameronh90 · 2021-09-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've automated the setup with puppet so I just deploy it automatically any time I bring up a machine.”
neutral · personal · pedrocr · 2019-12-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“the old fleet of Puppet-managed VMs we used to run”
neutral · production · atombender · 2019-08-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I just use the same chef, puppet or ansible playbook I will use for a physical server”
neutral · production · vikrantrathore · 2018-12-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“In all my years of trying systems like Puppet, Chef, etc, I've never seen this work quite as well.”
neutral · personal · spectre256 · 2018-11-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we use Packer to run the provisioning system (in our case Puppet).”
neutral · production · ncallaway · 2015-11-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“laid over some existing provisioning system like salt, ansible (or just a whole shit ton of puppet work)”
neutral · production · KirinDave · 2015-07-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I write mostly write C, Bash, Python, Go, Puppet.”
neutral · production · sleepydog · 2015-07-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we could do everything we need in production with LXC, puppet, carton and perlbrew.”
neutral · production · mrbig4545 · 2015-06-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we have a puppet script we run on the machine to install dependencies.”
neutral · production · rikrassen · 2015-06-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“all off the shelf, well understood tools: Debian Linux, DRBD, iSCSI, LACP, LVM, Puppet.”
neutral · production · mrmondo · 2015-03-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Developer or sysadmin time to control Puppet deployments and such still eat some factor of time.”
neutral · production · Nick-Craver · 2014-07-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“At work we use cfengine/puppet to maintain systems”
neutral · production · stevekemp · 2013-11-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use linux for: redis, elasticsearch, HAProxy, DNS (bind), nginx, mail (exim) apache, wordpress, mysql, nexpose, backups, puppet, asterix, android builds and our internal mercurial.”
neutral · production · Nick-Craver · 2013-10-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Puppet 2.7 wasn't compatible with Ruby 1.9+, but our app was running on 1.9. With a single system install, we'd not be able to run both.”
neutral · production · cheald · 2013-10-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“is the reason I know maven, ant, chef AND puppet, Jenkins, and gradle as well as I do.”
neutral · production · yajoe · 2013-09-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using Vagrant mainly as a testing platform for authoring Puppet modules, and it's been wonderful.”
neutral · personal · rbolkey · 2012-11-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“regularly run a five-VM stack (frontend, backend, memcached, database, Puppetmaster”
neutral · personal · eropple · 2012-11-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use puppet to manage staging and production configurations.”
neutral · production · lxt · 2011-08-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Using puppet and cloudformation or whatever it is that you prefer you can upgrade with very little trouble.”
neutral · production · dialtone · 2011-05-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we already use puppet and so every sysadmin now knows ruby”
neutral · production · zppx · 2010-12-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?