Since the launch of Puppet 5, three new services have been announced by Puppet: Tasks, Discovery, and Pipelines. Puppet Tasks provides us an imperative solution for automating ad hoc tasks. Puppet Discovery allows us to discover the state of infrastructure. Puppet Pipelines, which will be discussed briefly in the next chapter, covers application-level CI/CD.
In this chapter, we'll investigate and use Puppet Tasks to help manage a web server. We'll walk through some best practices and appropriate times for using Puppet Tasks. We'll then dive into Puppet Discovery and inspect our infrastructure. We'll use Puppet Discovery to make intelligent decisions on what to automate in our infrastructure.
