Depending on the hardware involved, you can dramatically speed up an ssh pipe by changing the encryption type, or turning off compression.
Edit: use ansible
I just started using puppet a few days ago and so far I'm really liking it. Except it's in Ruby and not Python. If puppet was written in python I would have just hacked up a new derived class. Oh well…
So my problem is that I want to distribute new id_rsa and id_rsa.pub files to my servers but I also want to be DRY. So therefore when I copy the id files over it should be possible to extract the public key and put it in authorized_keys.
This should have been significantly easier but here's how I did it.