Puppet Server and 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 server/agent structure. It's worth noting, however, that applying standalone manifests that are independent of your overall Puppet design can always be useful.

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

This chapter covers the following topics:

• The Puppet server
• Setting up the Puppet agent
• Performance optimizations
• Completing the stack with PuppetDB
• The Puppet CA