Back when the infrastructures.org folks were writing their pages, the page for file replication servers described a need to keep current copies of configuration files in /etc and all programs and other data from /usr/local on all the managed systems. In puppet structures, every file or other resource is just a part of a higher-order class or module. If we’re already keeping our classes and modules up to date on all the managed systems, then old-school file replication goes along automatically.