I looked through the docs, but couldn't find anything interesting regarding exchanging data between nodes. Everything seems to be isolated and the only real exchange seems to be possible in local script generators. How do you do stuff like "find all running frontend nodes and put them into this config file", or "find a database node and create a config with credentials valid for that node" using cdist?
I haven't looked at puppet in a while, but I think this feature is only possible in chef, where each node can execute search queries on the chef server. It is actually one of the reasons I prefer chef to puppet.
I guess since the developers of the tools are coming from the puppet world, they did not think about implementing it.
Wether this kind of feature should be implemented in the CM tool is another debate :)
Puppet provides a mechanism called Exported Resources allowing nodes to provide bits of config for use by other nodes. For example I presently export Nagios check resources for webservices on my web nodes, which are collected by my Nagios server for building it's config.
