Platform · 2005–2019 · Cloud Scale
Puppet
Declarative config management with a heavy enterprise sales motion. Still haunts datacenters that virtualized early.
Puppet faded as Ansible won greenfield with agentless simplicity and containers reduced pet-server drift. It stuck briefly in regulated enterprises that already paid for Puppet Enterprise support. Immutable infrastructure made ongoing convergence less fashionable.
Context
Split everything, then pay for the glue
Hyperscale patterns escaped the companies that needed them. Containers unified packaging; Kubernetes became the cloud OS; microservices and NoSQL were sold as defaults. Mobile-first stuck because screens changed. Cargo-cult distributed systems stuck around as invoices. The durable move was packaging and ops maturity — not rewriting every app into a mesh.
Compare with
Related
Platform · 2009–2020
Chef
Ruby DSL infrastructure as code with cookbooks and a community site. Ansible ate the simpler path.
Platform · 2012–now
Ansible
YAML over SSH that sysadmins could actually read. The config-management winner by approachability.
Platform · 2014–now
Kubernetes
Container orchestration that became the cloud's OS. Overkill for many; unavoidable for many others.