Creating a decentralized Puppet architecture

Puppet is a configuration management tool. You can use Puppet to configure and prevent configuration drift in a large number of client computers. If all your client computers are easily reached via a central location, you may choose to have a central Puppet server control all the client computers. In the centralized model, the Puppet server is known as the Puppet master. We will cover how to configure a central Puppet master in a few sections.

If your client computers are widely distributed or you cannot guarantee communication between the client computers and a central location, then a decentralized architecture may be a good fit for your deployment. In the next few sections, we will see how to configure a decentralized Puppet architecture.

As we have seen, we can run the puppet apply command directly on a manifest file to have Puppet apply it. The problem with this arrangement is that we need to have the manifests transferred to the client computers...