Perhaps I should have mentioned:

(1) The tiny machines are a cluster of 4 Raspberry Pi's. Administering 4 Pi's is tedious.

(2) They are not production machines. They are toys. Nothing sensitive.

(3) My serious machines are administered by me. Only me.

(4) The agent has saved me a ton of cluster-admin time. DNS service, LDAP service, NFS service, web service, cluster-wide file backup, coding tools, agent software, remote access. All installed for me. All I had to do is ask.