Interesting. My recollection is that Chef and Ansible both completely ran roughshod over Puppet, and that Puppet is now in the "antiquated tools that used to be relevant" bucket.
Anecdotal, yeah. But DevOps is my daily work, and I like to think I keep an eye on the tools ecosystem.
Back in the day (~10 years ago?) when the company I worked for was looking at replacing our internal custom provisioning and desired state configuration tooling it was Ansible that won out. We were running a mixed fleet of Windows and Linux hosts - the company was an ISP and shared hoster.
At that point in time both Puppet and Chef needed agents to be installed on your servers and we really didn't want to have to manage another background service running on hundreds to thousands of boxes. Ansible didn't have this requirement.
Also Windows support was pretty sketchy on Chef and Puppet back then, to the point of being almost studiously ignored, Ansible provided remote PowerShell support. And that was primarily the deciding factor.
I used Puppet around 2012. I remember looking at Ansible, and immediately seeing that its agentless, SSH-based approach was highly preferable. But every time i discussed it with the devops experts in and contracted to our company, they assured me that agentless was terrible, and had too many disadvantages, and couldn't scale.
And yet, here we are. Puppet grew an agentless mode, and then lost anyway. My former company's deep investment in integrating Puppet and MCollective into our infrastructure tooling must look increasingly like a millstone. Oh well, it was all interesting to work on.
Seems like doing $100M+ in ARR (as hinted in the article) is a win. Even more because Chef was acquired for $220M. I think Perforce will pay a bit more for Puppet.
Their last round in 2020 ($40M from Black Round) was debt financing, not investment. That to me is generally a sign of a struggling company. And when the CEO of such a company claims they were looking for other companies to acquire, it raises a number of questions.
The shorthand at the time--don't know how accurate--was that sysadmins tended to prefer Puppet and devs tended to prefer Chef. But, yes, I remember from attending Config mgmt camp a few times during the period that Ansible was really spiking in popularity. From what I saw, Ansible was easier to get started with and probably more appropriate for more general IT automation tasks.
Anecdotal, yeah. But DevOps is my daily work, and I like to think I keep an eye on the tools ecosystem.