A Puppet to many puppetmasters

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Puppet enables you to create a virtualised cloned infrastructure of your live systems. While Virtual machine (VM) technology is an important component of that, it's Puppet's ability to automatically build new machines based on complex manifests that makes a cloned instrastructure possible.

Puppeting the puppetmaster

All the state that makes up a puppetmaster is itself definable in a set of manifests and storable in a repository. There are a few complications to overwriting Puppet's main configuration directory (/etc/puppet) but they're handled by our open source dopuppetmaster module. Once the puppetmaster can be managed like all other nodes in the connected graph that makes up a complex infrastructure, complete isolated clones can be made to enable true test-as-live testing.

Storing the configs

The puppet master machine can be configured to store information about all the agents that connect to it. That information can then be used to configure host state.

Monitoring

One of the use cases enabled by stored configs is monitoring, using a tool such as Nagios. Each of the agent machines connects to the puppetmaster, retrieving its catalogue and storing its facts (from facter). By then re-puppeting the puppetmaster, effectively from itself, the puppetmaster can dynamically generate Nagios host config.

Applications: 
Nagios and Puppetmaster with PuppetDB

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