[_ix]

I think the default settings for puppet agents are typically 30 minutes if I'm not mistaken. I've inherited a bit of a DevOps mess with some 600-700 nodes in various states of management.

In previous positions, there was a great hew and cry that the run intervals were increased from 30 minutes to 60 minutes... eventually every four hours for production resources.

In my current position, production nodes are provisioned to run puppet once daily as a rule, triggered by cron jobs at a pseudorandom minute between 0200 and 0400 defined at server provisioning time.

How do these intervals compare to what you've seen?

[jo909]

Well I've seen many environments, and some only ran puppet manually whenever they would before had used ssh and made a change directly. Another allowed one group of admins to just continue to log in and make small config changes, then got alerts and diffs of those changes from running puppet in noop and incorporated those changes into their git after the fact.

It's a tool to be used however you see fit and what you describe sounds reasonable, but the most common (because default) setup I've seen is the 30 minute interval.

Which is why I would argue "time of last puppet run" is mostly fairly recent and consistent for all machines, but terraform apply is most often not run automatically, not even at daily intervals.