Manage systems with Puppet agent

In a standard Puppet configuration, each node periodically does configuration runs to revert unwanted changes and to pick up recent updates.

On *nix nodes, there are three main ways to do this:

Run Puppet agent as a service.

The easiest method. The Puppet agent daemon does configuration runs at a set interval, which can be configured.

Make a cron job that runs Puppet agent.

Requires more manual configuration, but a good choice if you want to reduce the number of persistent processes on your systems.

Only run Puppet agent on demand.

You can also deploy MCollective to run on demand on many nodes.

Choose whichever one works best for your infrastructure and culture.