Mastering Puppet - Second Edition

Conquer by dividing

Depending on the size of your deployment and the way you connect to all your nodes, a masterless solution may be a good fit. In a masterless configuration, you don't run the Puppet agent; rather, you push Puppet code to a node and then run the puppet apply command. There are a few benefits to this method and a few drawbacks, as stated in the following table:

Benefits	Drawbacks
No single point of failure	Can't use built-in reporting tools, such as dashboard
Simpler configuration	Exported resources require nodes having write access to the database.
Finer-grained control on where the code is deployed	Each node has access to all the code
Multiple simultaneous runs do not affect each other (reduces contention)	More difficult ...