puppet is a popular configuration-management tool. Puppet’s basic model is declarative: You define a set of “resources” and the state they should be in. A “resource” can be basically anything that might be managed on a server: file on disk, a user account, a provisioned database instance, a running service, … Puppet compiles the input puppet configuration into a “catalog” with all the defined resources, and creates a dependency graph: e.g. before the MySQL service can be start...
