Puppet agents and masters communicate over HTTPS, exchanging structured data in JSON, or PSON which allows binary data.
Msgpack is an efficient serialization protocol that behaves similarly to JSON. It provides faster and more robust serialization for agent-master communications, without requiring many changes in our code.
Enabling Msgpack serialization
Enabling msgpack is easy, but first, it must be installed because the gem is not included in the puppet-agent or puppetserver packages.
After this is configured,
the Puppet master server uses msgpack when serving
any agents that have preferred_serialization_format
set to msgpack
. Any agents without that
setting continue to receive PSON as normal.