I have been using Puppet Enterprise at work and Puppet OpenSource at home for a few years now. There’s a lot to love about both products, but since work uses PE and new features tend to land there first, I have been thinking about trying PE at home as well. I don’t have a large fleet or a large change velocity, so I think the conversion of the master might take some work but the agents will be easy. This will let me play with PE-only functions in my lab (specifically the PE Pipeline plugin for Jenkins) and reduces concern about drift between lab findings and work usage. It does have the downside that some of my blog articles, which I was always assured would work with the FOSS edition, may not be as foolproof in the future. However, I rarely saw that as a problem going the other way in the past, with mcollective management being the only exception. I haven’t written about mcollective much, so I think this is worth the tradeoff.
I am going to migrate my systems, rather that start fresh. This article was written as the migration happened, so if you pursue a similar migration, please read the whole article before starting – I did some things backwards or incomplete, and made a few mistakes that you could avoid. It was also written as something of a stream of consciousness. I’ve tried to edit it as best I can without losing that flow. I do hope you find it valuable.
Pre-Flight Checklist
Puppet Enterprise is a commercial product. You can use it for free with up to 10 nodes, though. This is perfect for my 9 managed-node home network. After that, it costs something around $200/node/year. Make sure you stay within that limit or pony up – we are responsible adults, we pay for the products we use. If you replace nodes, you can deactivate those nodes so they don’t continue to eat into your license count.
rnelson0 