Puppet

Puppet, an automated administrative engine for your *nix systems, performs administrative tasks (such as adding users, installing packages, and updating server configurations) based on a centralized specification.

Puppet can let you focus more on how things should be done and less on doing them. Let computers do what they are good at, precisely perform patterns, so you can focus on creating solutions. The act of specifying the services will help you clarify the systems you actually need and once your services are modelled using Puppet, your ability to scale and recover from hardware failure could just be plugging in a new blade, setting the hostname and starting puppet.

If your systems aren't going to change or scale you probably don't need Puppet, but your competition might...

• Homepage: http://reductivelabs.com/trac/puppet
• Subprojects: Naginator, Puppet Dashboard, Puppet Documentation, Puppet Recruiter, Reporter