Sam Bashton discusses the challenges of using standard Puppet in dynamic, auto-scaling environments and presents a decentralized approach without a Puppetmaster. The solution involves deploying Puppet manifests as RPMs via Jenkins and Pulp for efficient configuration management and code deployment. The architecture is AWS-specific but could be adapted to other cloud environments, emphasizing improved control, visibility, and versioning of configurations.

1. De-centralise and
Conquer
Masterless Puppet in a Dynamic
Environment
Sam Bashton, Bashton Ltd

2. Who am I?
● Linux guy since Slackware, floppy disks and
root + boot
● Using Puppet since 2007
● Run a company Manchester, North West
England

3. Our Environments
● We provide outsourced ops for other
companies
● High traffic environments
● Most are now on Amazon Web Services
● #1 reason for moving to AWS? The ability to
scale on demand

4. Server instances, single day

5. How we use Puppet
● No Puppetmaster
● Puppet manifests and modules distributed to
all machines

6. What's wrong with standard Puppet?
● Pets vs Cattle
● Standard Puppet configuration assumes that
servers are pets, not cattle

7. What's wrong with standard Puppet?
● Standard Puppetmaster/Puppet Client
configuration makes assumptions about
environments
○ Machine creation is a manual operation
■ Sign certs
○ No in-built mechanism to automatically clean up old
machines

8. What's wrong with standard Puppet?
● Puppetmaster is a single point of failure
● When servers are pets, this isn't too much of
a problem
○ Existing servers continue to work, but not any
updates

9. What's wrong with standard Puppet?
● When servers are auto-scaling cattle, new
instances can appear at any time
● New instances require config to become
operational
● Configuration requires Puppet

10. What's wrong with standard Puppet?
● Our environments span multiple data centres
('availability zones')
● Imagine a data centre fails
● New instances get auto-provisioned to
replace missing capacity
● But these instances need the Puppetmaster
● ..which was in the failed AZ

11. What's wrong with standard Puppet?
● Resource contention
● Even when Puppetmaster isn't in the failed
zone, multiple concurrent connections slow
things down

12. What's wrong with standard Puppet?
● None of these problems are insurmountable
● We could have configured a Puppetmaster a
cluster of Puppetmasters for our needs
○ With autosign
○ and some sort of certificate distribution mechanism
○ uuid certificate names
○ And a mechanism for cleaning up old machines

13. Meanwhile, on the other side of the
room...
● Another team was evaluating Pulp
● Provides yum repository management
● To be used for managing security updates
and deploying application code
http://pulpproject.org/

14. Pulp
● Allows cloning of repos, copying packages
between repos
● Allows us to push packages to clients
○ Uses qpid message queue
● Has 'content distribution servers' for easy
replication + clustering

15. How we deploy code
● Everything managed via the Jenkins
continuous integration server
● Jenkins uses Pulp to install code on remote
machines

16. How we deploy code
● Jenkins fetches code from source control
(git)
● An RPM is built
● Tests are run
● The RPM is added to the relevant Pulp
repository
● RPM installed on the target machine(s)

17. How we deploy code
● Jenkins also manages deployment lifecycle
● 'Promoted Builds' plugin used to install
previously built RPMs on staging
● Promoted Builds plugin then used to install
the same RPMs on live once testing is
complete

18. Deploying configuration as code
● Idea: Why not just build an RPM of our
Puppet manifests + modules?
● Have puppet apply as part of the %
postinst

19. Deploying configuration as code
● Allowed us to reuse our existing code
deployment infrastructure
● Manage configuration deployment from
Jenkins

20. How we deploy configuration
● Puppet manifests and modules are checked
into git
● Jenkins builds configuration into an RPM
● Jenkins promoted builds plugin applies the
updates to environments via Pulp

21. Our system architecture
● Quite AWS specific
● Concepts could be applied to other clouds
○ Once they catch up in terms of toolsets..

22. Separation of Roles
● CloudFormation - defines infrastructure
● Puppet manages configuration
● Pulp manages package versions
○ Pulp in turn managed via Jenkins for custom repos

23. Instance Provisioning
● Minimal images used
● cloud-init the only addition beyond standard
CentOS install
● cloud-init allows us to specify script to be run
at boot

24. Puppet bootstrap
● cloud-init script adds local Puppet yum repo
and installs the Puppet configuration RPM
● Installing the RPM installs Puppet and
applies the configuration

25. Machine metadata
● cloud-init also sets some variables in
/etc/environment
● $HOST_TYPE - the type of machine this is, eg
web, cache

26. Machine metadata
● Also set facts to be used by facter, eg RDS
database hostname
○ Values from CloudFormation
● $FACTER_DBHOST set via cloud-init too, eg /root/.my.cnf

27. Defining machine roles
● For each machine type there is a manifest
/etc/puppet/manifests/$HOST_TYPE.pp
● This file looks something like this:
node default {
import global
...
}

28. Building the RPM
● Puppet manifests and modules are all
packed into an RPM
● Owner set to root, mode 600
● %postinst creates an at job set for now + 1
minute to run puppet apply

29. Deploying configuration

30. Free wins!

31. Free wins
● Greater control over the timing of Puppet
runs
● Improved visibility - for ops and devs
● Configuration changes now have to be
deployed to testing/staging first

32. More free wins
● Puppet configs now have a version
● Easy to find config version on the machine
itself
● Config changelogs accessible on every
machine
○ (Git changelog added to RPM)

33. Cheap wins

34. Cheap wins
● Jenkins performs syntax checks with
puppet parser validate
● Jenkins also runs puppet-lint on
manifests

35. Cheap wins
● Config change required for new code?
○ Make the Puppet RPM version a dependency

36. The downsides
● Puppet manifests and modules on all
machines
○ Potentially a security issue?
● No reporting*

37. Alternative implementations
● Don't want to use Pulp?
● Could do basically the same thing with yum
s3 plugin
https://github.com/jbraeuer/yum-s3-plugin

38. Questions? Comments?
Sam Bashton
sam@bashton.com
Twitter: @bashtoni