Chapter 2. The Master and Its Agents

So far, you have dealt with some concise Puppet manifests that were built to model some very specific goals. By means of the puppet apply command, you can use such snippets on any machine in your infrastructure. This is not the most common way of using Puppet though, and this chapter will introduce you to the popular master/agent structure. It's worth noting, however, that applying standalone manifests can always be useful, which are independent of your overall Puppet design.

Under the master/agent paradigm, you will typically install the Puppet agent software on all nodes under your care and make them call the master, which is yet another Puppet installation. The master will compile the appropriate manifests and effectively remotely control the agents. Both the agent and the master authenticate themselves using trusted SSL certificates.

This chapter covers the following topics:

• The Puppet master
• Setting up the Puppet Agent
• Performance considerations...