puppet-enterprise

Puppet Enterprise

Puppet Enterprise is free for up to 10 nodes, and a great way of getting started with Puppet. This example brings up a Puppet Master and two agents, one Windows and one Linux based.

What

                                      443
                                       +
                                       |
                                       |
                   +-------------------|-------------------+
                   |          +--------v--------+          |
                   |          |                 |          |
                   |          |  puppet-master  |          |
                   |          |                 |          |
 puppet-enterprise |          +-----------------+          |
                   | +----------------+ +----------------+ |
                   | |                | |                | |
                   | |  puppet-agent  | | puppet-windows | |
                   | |                | |                | |
                   | +----------------+ +----------------+ |
                   +---------------------------------------+

How

This example is in two parts, first we'll bring up the Puppet Master. And after making a quick configuration change we'll bring up two Puppet agents.

With the module installed as described in the README, from this directory run:

puppet apply pe_master.pp --test --templatedir templates

This will bring up the master. Please note that this could take up to 10 minutes.

We now need to modify the pe_agent.pp manifest so it points at the newly created master. Open up pe_agent.pp and change the line:

$pe_master_hostname = 'ip-your-ip-here.us-west-2.compute.internal'

You can find the IP address under Private DNS in the AWS web console. Alternatively you can use the Puppet resource commands:

puppet resource ec2_instance puppet-master

This should return a Puppet resource, including the public and private IP and DNS details.

Finally you can run:

puppet apply pe_agent.pp --test --templatedir templates

Now lets login to your new Puppet Enterprise console. Retrieve the Public IP address of the puppet-master instance from the AWS console or using puppet resource, then visit:

https://your-public-ip-address

You can login with the username admin and the password puppetlabs, or you can change these in the pe_agent.pp file mentioned above.

Note the https part. Because we're just using a temporary IP address here you'll likely get a certificate error from your browser, ignore this for now.

You can learn more about using Puppet Enterprise from the comprehensive user guide

Discussion

This example demonstrates the power of using the AWS module but still has a few rough edges, specifically:

• You need to run the manifests twice, first to create the master and then to create the agents
• All certificates from agents are automatically signed by the master

All of these are solvable, one approach being to utilise Amazon's VPC service and to use the policy based autosigning API in Puppet. We'll likely build on this example as we develop the module.