I seem to be on a bit of a Puppet kick as of late. Of a night I’ve been watching the many awesome videos of the 2013 PuppetConf and I found this one quite interesting. To me this pattern shows the future of deploying vendor supplied applications and I’m sure all sysadmins will be eternally grateful.
I just wish the presentation had been allowed to finish. 
For some time now I’ve been designing and developing some labs to replace the coming void that will be left by TechNet (please sign the petition!). My efforts have been focused on using VMware Fusion in conjunction with Vagrant and Packer. Both Vagrant and Packer are big deals in the DevOps communities due to the ability to quickly and easily destroy and create lab/dev environments.
