SSL is a core component of Puppet. The Puppet Master uses SSL certificates to authenticate client systems. Proper management of SSL is vitally important to ensure that your Puppet system is secure and behaves properly.
Note
This section assumes you have some knowledge about the working of SSL. If you require a primer on SSL, a good reference is https://info.ssl.com/ssl-made-easy-for-beginners/.
By default, the Puppet Master will act as an SSL Certificate Authority (CA). As part of the SSL CA, the master will accept certificate requests from new agents. You can then choose whether to sign the certificate on the master. There is also a methodology to enable autosigning. We'll cover this in the next section.
Puppet can also support use of an external certificate authority. You might want to do this if you already have a certificate authority configured to allow you to utilize existing certificates. This avoids the overhead of needing two separate certificate authorities. At the...