Understanding node classification
Classification of a node involves finding which environment a node should use, which classes should be applied to a node, and which parameters should be applied to a node. The ideal scenario is to have a single role class applied to a host, but the business logic can be more complicated. This applies to both agent runs to the Puppet Server and puppet apply runs.
Having defined what node classification is, we will now look at the methods that can be used for classification, taking node definitions first as the simplest approach.
Node definitions
The most basic method of node classification is using a node definition, which is a section of Puppet code allowing matching against node names to assign classification information and top-level variables to servers but not the environment. If only using node definitions, the client’s requested environment based on puppet.conf will be used. The node name will be the same as the certname setting...
