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grekasius
Asked: 2014-07-27 04:09:23 +0800 CST

Puppet: differences between centralized and decentralized manifest distribution

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There seem to be two different ways to distribute puppet manifests:

  1. Centralized:

    This involves running a central puppet master server which is periodically queried by puppet agents for changes.

  2. Decentralized:

    In this case there is no central puppet master server and manifests are distributed to the nodes some other way, for example via Git. Then a node runs puppet apply to apply the changes.

I would like to know what are the main differences between the two approaches and if any puppet feature depends on a particular approach.

puppet

2 Answers

  1. It depends.

    I use Puppet Enterprise, so out of the box, it's pretty well-equipped to handle the geographically-dispersed environment I manage. For me, I also leverage mcollective, which provides other benefits.

    See what works for you. Everyone does this differently. I wouldn't use a Git approach unless you had a specific constraint. E.g. do it the Puppet way unless you have a reason not to.

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  2. I'm not 100% sure about others but stuff like exported resources definitely depend on having a puppet master with puppet DB.

    I doubt there will be stuff that you can do with a decentralized architecture and not with a centralized one.

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