[Puppet Users] Re: Best practices for infrastructure

Ellison Marks
Fri, 23 Aug 2013 16:49:33 -0000

With hiera, you''ll obviously need to sync your hiera data and
hierarchy,
along with your modules and whatever else, between your masters.

For mcollective, There are ways to set up a network of brokers, both to
distribute load and to make sure that if a site gets separated, mcollective
will still work locally.
http://docs.puppetlabs.com/mcollective/deploy/middleware/activemq.html#settings-for-networks-of-brokers.
That entire page is actually pretty useful...

On Friday, August 23, 2013 9:03:41 AM UTC-7, Paul Archer
wrote:
>
> I''m new to puppet, fixin'' to (in Texas parlance) setup a
largish
> installation, and want to make sure I get things right the first time.
>
> I have a colo plus several satellite locations, with many more on the way.
>
> I''ll be using open-source Puppet, as we have way too many nodes to
manage
> (potentially 275+ at each site) to afford PE.
>
> I''m thinking about setting up a master in the colo with a slaved
master at
> each site, following this document:
> http://docs.puppetlabs.com/guides/scaling_multiple_masters.html
> Each master will run passenger/apache. I''ll have puppetDB running
on the
> primary master at the colo (with an eye to moving it to a separate server
> if needed). I''ll probably use Subversion (but maybe git) for
> synchronization of data among masters.
> I''d like to use mcollective and hiera, so those will probably get
setup on
> the primary master. (Do I need them on each master?)
>
> One of our sites is a lab, so I''ll be doing testing
there.I''ll need to
> setup some kind of dev/test/prod environment system.
>
> I''ll be testing both dashboard and foreman, although I need to do
> automated bare-metal installs, so foreman will probably win out there.
>
> Each site also has around 100 nodes that break and get swapped out
> frequently, so (depending on what foreman can do for me in the installation
> process) I might need to be relatively lax about certificates to avoid
> revoking and regenerating them constantly. (We''re talking 2-3
nodes a week
> getting pulled, worked on, and replaced or reimaged.)
>
>
> So that''s where I am right now. Any thoughts, suggestions, tips,
how-tos
> would be greatly appreciated.
>
>
> Paul