Puppet 2.7 Cookbook

Scaling Puppet using Passenger

If your Puppet infrastructure's starting to creak at the seams, the culprit could be the Puppetmaster's web server. Puppet ships with a simple web server called Webrick to handle client connections to the Puppetmaster. Webrick is not really considered suitable for using Puppet in production; with more than a few servers as it can bring the Puppetmaster to its knees.

Mongrel is sometimes suggested as an alternative as it is a little better than Webrick, but not much. In order to scale Puppet to hundreds of servers, the preferred approach is to switch to a high-performance web server such as Apache using the Passenger (mod_rails) extension.

Puppet comes with the necessary configuration to run under Passenger, so all ...