A configuration management tool such as Puppet is best used when you have many machines to manage. If all the machines can reach a central location, using a centralized Puppet infrastructure might be a good solution. Unfortunately, Puppet doesn't scale well with a large number of nodes. If your deployment has less than 4,000 servers, a single Puppet master should be able to handle the load, assuming your catalogs are not complex (take less than 10 seconds to compile each catalog). If you have a larger number of nodes, I suggest a load-balancing configuration, described in Mastering Puppet.
A Puppet master is a Puppet server that acts as an X509 certificate authority for Puppet and distributes catalogs (compiled manifests) to client nodes. The puppet master runs the puppetserver service. Puppetserver is a JRuby application running...
