Creating a decentralized Puppet architecture

Puppet is a configuration management tool that can be used 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. Originally, the Puppet master ran a service named master, it now runs a service named puppetserver, but the name has remained. We will cover how to configure a central Puppet master later.

If your client computers are widely distributed or you cannot guarantee communication between 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...