100% Agree. I originally got into Puppet after spending several months with a client that wanted me to write bash scripts to push out a major middleware deploym

100% Agree. I originally got into Puppet after spending several months with a client that wanted me to write bash scripts to push out a major middleware deployment, switchover, and uninstall to 10,000+ stores. There was no standard for the hardware in the stores, and their configuration was all over the place because 100's of teams also used (non-idempotent) shell scripts to push changes. I learned a lot about catching all the different bad things that can happen, adding prerequisite checks, rolling back changes automatically, etc. In the end, a tool like Puppet/Chef/Ansible would have taken a fraction of the time to develop scripts for. Containers have definitely lessened the need for mutable configuration management, but they are still useful in the 90% of environments that are still working in a past decade.