The world of systems administration changes, and Puppet does too. It appeared to us to be a very powerful tool that helps us in day-to-day operations, making it easier and comprehensible to provision and maintain infrastructures composed by either a few or hundreds of nodes.

In this chapter, we saw how this tool is evolving in several ambits. We saw on one side new features that will be included in the language and in the APIs for simplicity and to help us write more efficient catalogs. We saw how even best practices change: something that looked like a very good idea to extend Puppet, as was the case of the faces, now is looked on as something difficult to maintain, and new recommendations are given. We also saw that some resources as packages could be managed in different and better ways.

On the other side, at a more internal level, we saw that some parts are changing to give better support and scalability to any kind of deployment. The new CA, the direct Puppet initiative, and plugin sync will change the way Puppet infrastructure is deployed and scaled.

In the near future, we'll see how Puppet adapts to new paradigms as it did with the cloud. Now the disruption caused by the popularization of containers is changing everything. Minimalistic computers and operating systems will soon require the same provisioning tools we have today in general purpose servers. Puppet, with its new and more modular implementations in compiled languages, will probably offer us tools for these newer worlds.