Executing code on the client

Several of the configuration management systems described here allow you to reuse the node descriptors to execute code on matching nodes. This is sometimes convenient. For example, maybe you want to run a directory-listing command on all HTTP servers facing the public internet, perhaps for debugging purposes.

In the Puppet ecosystem, this command execution system is called Marionette Collective, or MCollective for short.

A note about the exercises

It is pretty easy to try out the various deployment systems using Docker to manage the base OS, where we will do our experiments. It is a time-saving method that can be used when developing and debugging the deployment code which is specific to a particular deployment system. This code will then be used for deployments on physical or virtual machines.

First, we will try each of the different deployment systems that are usually possible in local deployment modes. Further down the line, we will see how we can simulate the...