For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life, please press three.

--Alice Kahn

In this chapter, you'll learn about some of the challenges of managing configuration on servers, some common solutions to these problems, and how automation tools such as Puppet can help. You'll also learn how to download the GitHub repository containing all of the source code and examples in this book, how to set up your own Vagrant virtual machine to run the code, and how to download and install Puppet.

Whether you're a system administrator, a developer who needs to wrangle servers from time to time, or just someone who's annoyed at how long it takes to deploy a new app, you'll have come across the kind of problems Puppet is designed to solve.