Puppet Master and Puppet Server Confusion (What is the difference?)

Question

I recently started learning puppet after I joined my organisation a month ago. My organisation uses puppet 3 and is in the phase of moving to puppet 4.

I am currently playing with puppet 3.8. Though the puppet documentation is nice I don't understand what is the difference between puppetserver and puppetmaster.

From this link I understood that: Puppet includes a basic puppet master web server, but you cannot use it for real-life loads. You must configure a production quality web server before you start managing your nodes with Puppet. Correct me if I am wrong this is the puppetserver service right ? Isn't this powerful enough to serve like 400 servers ? Do we really need puppetmaster ( Apache/Passenger Puppet Master ) ?

Also from this link I found that they have deprecated webserver. So can i skip learning the puppetmaster part as it will no longer be used ?

Answer 1

There are a couple things going on at once here:

• The default Puppet Master running using WEBrick is the not production-ready service.
• The default Puppet Master running using Rack and Apache is the production-ready service.
• The Puppet Server is a newer project, designed to replace the default Puppet Master, and is production-ready.

Answer 2

A very good explanation for the difference between puppet server and master has been provided on the official site itself.

https://docs.puppet.com/puppetserver/5.0/puppetserver_vs_passenger.html

The conclusion is, puppet-server is going to be the future and puppet master will be deprecated over the time.