The amount of time I spent in Puppet writing modules to install things to a master was ridiculous. I could have not automated and done it manually, but I preferred bootstrapping Puppet with Puppet.
And that time you spend setting up a master? It's hopefully limited. But the joy doesn't end. Once your master is set up, then you get to install Puppet on every client too, and configure the client to point to your puppetmaster.
Ansible is really a data (or as they say, model) driven massively parallel shell scripting system with advanced templating, tailored for configuration management. It does a lot more, and it's design footprint is at the same time far less. ++
I was running into the same problem. So I wrote a playbook that deploys puppet agent using Ansible. https://github.com/rothgar/ansible-playbooks/tree/master/pla...
After writing that, and a few other playbooks, I really like Ansible and could see eventually replacing Puppet or at least using both in my environment.
And that time you spend setting up a master? It's hopefully limited. But the joy doesn't end. Once your master is set up, then you get to install Puppet on every client too, and configure the client to point to your puppetmaster.
Ansible is really a data (or as they say, model) driven massively parallel shell scripting system with advanced templating, tailored for configuration management. It does a lot more, and it's design footprint is at the same time far less. ++