Once upon a time... ...there was server. It was a good little server. It only had one application to serve, and a nice sysadmin who cared for it. He'd configured it from bare metal, had hand-crafted each config file, and installed every package by hand.
How does it work? Standalone A local manifest is manually applied to the local server Locally :) Client/Server The client sends it's information to the server The server sends back the configuration The client applies it
Resource Describes a "thing" There are many types of things... user, group, file, package, service... http://docs.puppetlabs. com/references/latest/type.html