Puppet is able to handle no matter just one machine or even ten thousands of machines, and arrange all your configuration work in order. The configuration management system is used to manage resources such as documents, users, processes and software packages. A thousand machines are supposed to be managed in the traditional way. You can choose cfengine or “for” cycle, and “for” cycle is the most used way.
You can run a server with Puppet, and every client connects to the server through the ssl certificate, and then gets the configuration list of this machine and to do the configuration work according to the list.
If the hardware has been configured, it will be pretty easy for you to configure more than ten thousands machine within a day. But the precondition is that the configurations of most machines are similar. Google manages more than 6,000 Mac desktop computers with Puppet.
Puppet is also useful for personal users. You can save your frequently used configuration as the puppet format. When you reinstall the system, you just need to run the configuration and it will configure the system according to what you have set up, just like my computer.
