Absolutely this. When the intent is to get the system into a desired state, reach for Puppet/Salt/Ansible. If you are doing sysop^Wdevops work it is the single

Absolutely this. When the intent is to get the system into a desired state, reach for Puppet/Salt/Ansible. If you are doing sysop^Wdevops work it is the single most important thing you can learn, once you have a good grasp of your shell and your editor. The difference between a giant git archive of shell scripts that various people have modified over the years and state changes described in a configuation management language is the difference between fixing things in the small and reasoning about integrated systems. It's something that needs to be experienced to be appreciated. Reasoning about system state as an integrated whole is just as relevant when you are shipping applications as containers, if not more so. It's not uncommon to start using something like Kubernetes without first being able to describe global state and the result is just as messy as before, if not worse. Something like Helm is impossible to understand unless you have complete control over your configuration.