3 + 2 + 1 = 3,000
3 classroom courses, 2 certifications, 1 foray into online learning = over 3,000 people trained
The Puppet Education and Certification department recently turned one year old, and it has been a productive first year with great new programs and curriculum yet to come. As a company, Puppet Labs has always focused on providing verifiably useful solutions, and Puppet Education and Certification is no exception.
For system administrators, we offer a Puppet Fundamentals for System Administrators course that allows students to spend three days exploring best practices in automating the configuration and administration of system infrastructure using Puppet. This introductory course covers topics such as the puppet agent-master architecture of Puppet, how to define and declare puppet resources, and how to make the most of modules already freely available through the Puppet Forge. Students who want to validate their hands-on experience with Puppet software can take the System Administration Using Puppet (Puppet 201) exam to earn their Puppet Professional certification.
For more experienced Puppet users, we offer the “Advanced Puppet for Puppet Masters”, a follow-on, three-day course to Puppet Fundamentals. This advanced course delves further into topics of advanced puppet resources, and adds considerations such as data separation and code compression, MCollective and PuppetDB, and deploying and scaling Puppet in complex environments. There is currently no exams for a Puppet Master certification to follow this course, but we might add one later, based on community demand.
Additionally, we offer an advanced, four-day training created specifically for developers called Extending Puppet using Ruby, preceded by an optional Introduction to Ruby for Puppet Development course. This course trains developers on developing and implementing custom facts, functions, and types and providers for Puppet. It also covers the development of custom plug-ins for MCollective, as well as custom reports for the entire Puppet solution. For developers who want to validate their skills, we offer a follow-up exam to this education track — the Puppet 301 exam Developing for Puppet using Ruby, which will bestow the Puppet Developer certification upon passing.
How effective are these trainings and certifications? Well, if course surveys are any indication, satisfaction is consistently high with overall satisfaction score averaging around 4.5 out of 5, applicability of the knowledge averaging around 4.65 out of 5, and instructor knowledge averaging around 4.8 out of 5. Of course, each student’s needs are unique, so come to one of our training courses and be sure to let us know your own rating for our Puppet Education and Certification offerings.
What’s next for Puppet Education and Certification? As indicated in our headline, we are busy working on making online learning available through a new Learning Management System on the Puppet Labs website, and our first sample course “What is Puppet” is available online right now to give you a taste of online learning to come. If you are looking for a tool to get others excited about Puppet, be sure to point them to this introductory video segment.
There are a number of offerings we are also considering, including task-based courseware on topics such as best practices through optimized Puppet modules, advanced concept lessons through our online courses, virtual delivery of our courses for remote attendees, and an expansion of our certification offerings. We would love to hear from our Puppet community members on what you would like to see, so please send us your inputs and requests to help us develop future offerings.
Have ideas and suggestions? Please send them to education@puppetlabs.com and make your input count.
Learn More
- New to Puppet? Check out this video for a very basic introduction
- Learn about the different types of training courses we offer
- Think you know Puppet? Well, get certified to prove your skills!



