In order to understand what syndication is all about in Salt, let's step back a few years to when an infrastructure's size did not often go beyond a few dozen nodes. Server management software didn't really need to handle a lot of connections, and often didn't.
Puppet was one of the earlier configuration-management platforms that really started addressing scale. Since Puppet uses an HTTP-based methodology, early documentation discussed the pros and cons and the various configurations of different web servers.
As we discussed in the previous chapter, Salt doesn't use HTTP and so needs to employ different strategies to address scale. On its own, some users report using Salt to manage over 10,000 machines. However, not everybody has the kind of beefy hardware that those users have available for their masters.
The syndic system was designed for infrastructures where the master was not expected to be powerful enough to handle the load from...