Platform · 2005–2019 · Cloud Scale
Puppet
Declarative config management with a heavy enterprise sales motion. Still haunts datacenters that virtualized early.
Why Puppet faded
Puppet faded as Ansible won greenfield with agentless simplicity and containers reduced pet-server drift. It stuck briefly in regulated enterprises that already paid for Puppet Enterprise support. Immutable infrastructure made ongoing convergence less fashionable.
Compare with
Related
Platform · 2009–2020
Chef
Ruby DSL infrastructure as code with cookbooks and a community site. Ansible ate the simpler path.
Platform · 2012–now
Ansible
YAML over SSH that sysadmins could actually read. The config-management winner by approachability.
Platform · 2014–now
Kubernetes
Container orchestration that became the cloud's OS. Overkill for many; unavoidable for many others.