Chapter 1. Dealing with Load/Scale

A large deployment will have a large number of nodes. If you are growing your installation from scratch, you might have to start with a single Puppet master. At a certain point in your deployment, a single Puppet master just won't cut it—the load will become too great. In my experience, this limit is around 600 nodes. Puppet agent runs begin to fail on the nodes and catalogs fail to compile. There are two ways to deal with this problem: pide and conquer or conquer by piding.

That is, we can either split up our Puppet master, piding the workload among several machines, or we can make each of our nodes apply our code directly using Puppet agent (this is known as a masterless configuration). We'll examine each of these solutions separately.