As Puppet closes in on its 10th anniversary, it’s clear that the open-source configuration tool is here to stay. Systems administrators and tech pros all over the world use it to manage the configuration of Windows and Unix systems; its cross-platform capabilities are diverse, with support for Debian, Ubuntu, SUSE, and Oracle Linux (among others). The number of job postings on Dice for Puppet professionals has increased 40 percent over the last year, making it one of the fastest-growing skills in the database. Simply put, companies like how the platform makes their infrastructure easier to manage; they like it so much, in fact, that they’re willing to pay out good salaries to those tech pros who know how to use it. According to the most recent Dice Salary Survey, a tech pro specializing in Puppet can expect to earn an annual salary of $120,072—a whopping year-over-year increase of 15 percent. Given the fierce competition for pros with this skill set, however, some employers will doubtlessly pay more, and offer up some generous perks besides. Check out the latest Puppet-related jobs.
Getting to Know Puppet
The Puppet Professional Certification costs $200, and requires a 90-minute computer-based exam with 60 multiple-choice questions. As a baseline, Puppet Certified Professionals should understand Puppet IT automation software, and have the ability to administer system infrastructure using the tool. They should also be able to develop basic modules, including data separation and external data sources. Once a pro is certified, they’ll likely face Puppet-related questions during their next job interview. Those questions might include something along the lines of, “Describe the most significant gain you made from automating a process through Puppet.” Other lines of inquiry might focus on how the candidate used Puppet to solve some difficult DevOps issue, or which open-source tools can make Puppet more powerful. Nor is Puppet alone among management tools; others, including Chef, have also seen their popularity rise over the past few years, as tech pros try to find a way to more easily manage increasingly diverse systems.
