> No masters. For Ansible this meant using ansible-playbook locally, and for Salt this meant using salt-call locally. Using a master for configuration management adds an unnecessary point of failure and sacrifices performance.

There are two models for delivering state to your infrastructure nodes. Pulling and Pushing configuration. Ansible Pushes code from the controller to your nodes, while salt, puppet and chef all pull state from a master somewhere.

Like twic says, Ansible does not have a master. The original author says no masters means faster performance. What he means is that pulling configuration from a remote checkout equals faster performance, which is true because it can be loadbalanced etc.

A chef/puppet master can have features such as search and service discovery that should be a large red flag for SPOF problems.