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Puppet Labs vs Puppeteer: What are the differences?
Puppet Labs: Server automation framework and application. Puppet is an automated administrative engine for your Linux, Unix, and Windows systems and performs administrative tasks (such as adding users, installing packages, and updating server configurations) based on a centralized specification; Puppeteer: Headless Chrome Node API. Puppeteer is a Node library which provides a high-level API to control headless Chrome over the DevTools Protocol. It can also be configured to use full (non-headless) Chrome.
Puppet Labs and Puppeteer are primarily classified as "Server Configuration and Automation" and "Headless Browsers" tools respectively.
Puppet Labs and Puppeteer are both open source tools. Puppeteer with 51.2K GitHub stars and 4.72K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Puppet Labs with 5.37K GitHub stars and 2.1K GitHub forks.
According to the StackShare community, Puppet Labs has a broader approval, being mentioned in 180 company stacks & 49 developers stacks; compared to Puppeteer, which is listed in 25 company stacks and 19 developer stacks.
I am using Node 12 for server scripting and have a function to generate PDF and send it to a browser. Currently, we are using PhantomJS to generate a PDF. Some web post shows that we can achieve PDF generation using Puppeteer. I was a bit confused. Should we move to puppeteerJS? Which one is better with NodeJS for generating PDF?

You better go with puppeteer. It is basically chrome automation tool, written in nodejs. So what you get is PDF, generated by chrome itself. I guess there is hardly better PDF generation tool for the web. Phantomjs is already more or less outdated as technology. It uses some old webkit port that's quite behind in terms of standards and features. It can be replaced with puppeteer for every single task.

I suggest puppeteer to go for. It is simple and easy to set up. Only limitaiton is it can be used only for chrome browser and currently they are looking into expanding into FF. The next thing is Playwright which is just a scale up of Puppeteer. It supports cross browsers.
I'm just getting started using Vagrant to help automate setting up local VMs to set up a Kubernetes cluster (development and experimentation only). (Yes, I do know about minikube)
I'm looking for a tool to help install software packages, setup users, etc..., on these VMs. I'm also fairly new to Ansible, Chef, and Puppet. What's a good one to start with to learn? I might decide to try all 3 at some point for my own curiosity.
The most important factors for me are simplicity, ease of use, shortest learning curve.

I have been working with Puppet and Ansible. The reason why I prefer ansible is the distribution of it. Ansible is more lightweight and therefore more popular. This leads to situations, where you can get fully packaged applications for ansible (e.g. confluent) supported by the vendor, but only incomplete packages for Puppet.
The only advantage I would see with Puppet if someone wants to use Foreman. This is still better supported with Puppet.
If you are just starting out, might as well learn Kubernetes There's a lot of tools that come with Kube that make it easier to use and most importantly: you become cloud-agnostic. We use Ansible because it's a lot simpler than Chef or Puppet and if you use Docker Compose for your deployments you can re-use them with Kubernetes later when you migrate
Pros of Puppet Labs
- Devops51
- Automate it44
- Reusable components26
- Dynamic and idempotent server configuration21
- Great community18
- Cloud management12
- Very scalable12
- Easy to maintain10
- Free tier9
- Works with Amazon EC26
- Declarative4
- Ruby4
- Works with Azure3
- Works with OpenStack3
- Nginx1
- Ease of use1
Pros of Puppeteer
- Scriptable web browser10
- Very well documented9
- Promise based6
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Cons of Puppet Labs
- Steep learning curve3
- Customs types idempotence1
Cons of Puppeteer
- Chrome only10