Six months ago, in our not-for-profit project we decided to start migrating our system management to a Puppet controlled environment because we are expecting our number of servers to grow substantially between now and a year from now.

Since the decision has been made our IT guys have become a bit too annoyed a bit too often. Their biggest objections are:

• "We're not programmers, we're sysadmins";
• Modules are available online but many differ from one another; wheels are being reinvented too often, how do you decide which one fits the bill;
• Code in our repo is not transparent enough, to find how something works they have to recurse through manifests and modules they might have even written themselves a while ago;
• One new daemon requires writing a new module, conventions have to be similar to other modules, a difficult process;
• "Let's just run it and see how it works"
• Tons of hardly known 'extensions' in community modules: 'trocla', 'augeas', 'hiera'... how can our sysadmins keep track?

I can see why a large organisation would dispatch their sysadmins to puppet courses to become puppet masters. But how would smaller players get to learn puppet to a professional level if they do not go to courses and basically learn it via their browser and editor?