After our first list of nodes to discover, Puppet Discovery will automatically take us to a splash page, allowing us to select an authentication method. At the time of writing this book, three methods are available: an SSH Private Key, an SSH Credential, and a WinRM Credential. SSH Private Keys are generally the most secure method available, but if SSH keys are not available on the remote systems, a username and password is taken via SSH Credential for Linux or WinRM Credential for Windows.

In this section, we'll be using an SSH key to provide connections to the machines we discovered in the previous step.