I've recently done a project with puppet that turned out horribly. I'll share what I discovered: * Puppet's error messages are next to useless. Sometimes it

I've recently done a project with puppet that turned out horribly. I'll share what I discovered: * Puppet's error messages are next to useless. Sometimes it can only tell you which file had an error, and not which line number. Sometimes you'll be left wondering where in the many files that make up a complex project there was an error. * The only way to actually test the correctness of your puppet scripts is to deploy on real servers. Your staging environment has to be identical to production if you don't want any nasty surprises. * Despite being written in ruby, the design doesn't follow ruby's philosophies or best practices. The config language is not dynamic or ruby-ish. Compared to ruby, you get code blowout when you can't use DRY and have to unroll loops to fit inside the bounds of what the config language can do. * Simple things are hard. You have to write your own modules or use 3rd party modules for what I consider simple things, such as editing an existing system config file to add two lines in the middle if they don't already exist. * There's a steep learning curve because a large project is like spaghetti code where you aren't quite sure which file to find what you're looking for. It is very easy to create dependency loops, and hard to find them, and even harder to resolve them. I ended up generating the dependency graph to a PNG file and eyeballing it, several times per day. I got the impression that puppet is ideal for getting a "PHP+MYSQL" server up and running that requires almost no deviation from the operating system defaults. If your setup is a more complex one I'd stay well away.