Over the past few years, an awful lot of effort has gone into making Puppet perform well when scaled, and this has led to several interesting advances in the product. Not only has the catalog compilation become faster (200 times faster from version 2 to version 3), but some serious gains have been made in terms of scaling massive Puppet installations. As is often the case, this isn't just about making some things faster but also about taking a good hard look at how some components function and replacing them with something more suitable if they are found to be wanting.

Increased performance was obviously at the forefront of Puppet Labs developers' minds when they came to consider exported configurations. Exported configurations are an excellent feature in Puppet that allow a node to pass its configuration onto other nodes. This is especially handy when configuring backups, monitoring, or any other item that might need to know how another node is configured. By...