In the past two weeks, we learned how to create packages for our own applications and how to host them in a repository. The next step is to puppetize the application so that you can deploy your application to nodes through automation. We’ll need to add the repo to our base profile, so all nodes receive it, define a profile that requires the application, and a role class and corresponding hiera yaml to apply the configuration to a specified node. Let’s get started!

Add the repo to the base profile

This step is fairly simple. Last week, we defined the repo and applied it manually with:

  yumrepo {'el-6.5':
    descr    => 'rnelson0 El 6.5 - x86_64',
    baseurl  => 'http://yum.nelson.va/el-6.5/',
    enabled  => 'true',
    gpgcheck => 'false',
  }

Add that to your base profile. It should look something like this now:

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In last week’s article, we learned how to build a package with FPM, specifically an RPM. Today, we’ll look at creating a Yum repository to host your packages. The repo can be built with puppet, which can also distribute settings so all your managed nodes can use the repo. By adding the package to the repo, it becomes available to install, again via puppet. This is the first step on the road to the automated software packing and delivery that is vital for continuous integration.

A repo has a few components.

• Webserver – Content is served up over http.
• createrepo – A piece of software that manages the repo’s catalog.
• RPMs – What it’s serving up.

We don’t need to know how the pieces work, though. We’ll rely on palli/createrepo to manage the repo itself. We just make sure a webserver is available, the directories are there, and that there’s some content available.

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In my exploration of Puppet, I’ve found a lot of oblique references to managing software deployments with it, but very little solid guides on how to do so. I need to tackle this for work, so I figured I should start at the top – creating a software deployment. To be clear, I’m speaking of internally developed software, or modifications to public software, not something you can find in your distribution’s packages and install with the puppet package resource type.

Creating Some Software

Going back even further, we need to create some software. I’d wager that most already have something laying around – perhaps a few scripts in a directory along with a Makefile that lets you run “make install” to put them in the final destination, or a tarball and config file that are “installed” by a script that untars the software and copies your customized config in place. If you don’t have something like that, let’s make something. How about a simple PHP application? It’s just a Hello World, nothing special, so you don’t need to know PHP for this.

Spin up a new VM, or requisition one of your existing dev VMs. I’m going to use server01 from the Puppet series. Make sure apache and php are installed, and if this node isn’t managed via our web server role, iptables may block connections so we will stop it:

[rnelson0@server01 ~]$ sudo puppet apply -e "package {['httpd', 'php']: ensure => present}"
Notice: Compiled catalog for server01.nelson.va in environment production in 0.33 seconds
Notice: /Stage[main]/Main/Package[php]/ensure: created
Notice: Finished catalog run in 20.70 seconds
[rnelson0@server01 ~]$ sudo service httpd restart
Stopping httpd:                                            [FAILED]
Starting httpd:                                            [  OK  ]
[rnelson0@server01 ~]$ sudo service iptables stop
iptables: Setting chains to policy ACCEPT: filter          [  OK  ]
iptables: Flushing firewall rules:                         [  OK  ]
iptables: Unloading modules:                               [  OK  ]

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Welcome back! I hope everyone had a good summer and recharged their batteries. Bonus points if you found time to play with puppet, too! Now that we’ve had a healthy break, let’s get back to it!

When we left the series in July, we had a Puppet master, a few nodes, were implementing the roles and profiles pattern, and used r10k to manage it all. However, we didn’t address scalability. Today, we’ll take a look at addressing this by using Apache and Passenger.

Scaling Up

There are two ways to scale – out and up. If we were to scale out, we’d be concerned with running multiple masters and synchronizing all data between them. That’s something we might look at eventually, but first we want to scale up, which is the process of providing more resources to our master. Since we are vSphere admins, we can easily increase the resources provided to the VM. For instance, our VM has 1 vCPU and 2GB of RAM. It would be easy, and helpful, to increase that, perhaps to 2×4 or 4×8 vCPUxRAM.

Unfortunately, system resources are not the only limitation in our system. Out of the box, Puppet uses WEBrick and scales to about 10 nodes. More than one nodes trying to talk at the same time will generate conflicts and cause some or all nodes to fail to receive a catalog. No matter the resources available, these limitations persist. The answer is to use a dedicated web server with a Rack-based application stack. While any server will work, if you don’t have a preference, then PuppetLabs suggests you use Apache with the Passenger mod. There is a lot of information on Puppet’s site about the limitations and the remedy.

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In our ongoing Puppet series, we just completed installing PuppetDB and Hiera. There’s one other installable that’s a bit more complicated than those two.

MCollective

Since writing this article, the module puppetlabs/mcollective has been updated. In particular, the “middleware => true” parameter is not valid in the base class. I have not had time to revisit this and update the solution. If you have, please drop me a line in the comments!

The last component we’re going to install today is MCollective. While developed by Puppet Labs, MCollective isn’t directly related to Puppet, as PuppetDB and Hiera are. It’s not a Configuration Management tool, it’s an Orchestration API. It does integrate quite well with Puppet and Facter, among other sources. Some things you can do with MCollective might be to query how many systems have 32GB of RAM, how many systems are running a version of OpenSSL vulnerable to Heartbleed, or to restart Apache on all servers in the Development environment. This installation is trickier than either PuppetDB or Hiera.
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Welcome back to our Puppet for vSphere Admins series. We started out deploying the puppet master and a few example manifests, then took a right turn into the land of Git and workflows. I know you’re anxious to get back to developing manifests, but we’ve got a few more things to install on the master before we worry about the manifests. PuppetDB and Hiera, and MCollective are powerful tools that most administrators will find of immense benefit. We can install these later, but we’d have to redo some of our work. Who wants to do that?

As I mentioned last week, I’ll assume you’re using r10k at some level, so I’ll mostly just reference “use r10k” unless there’s a specific gotcha. If you’re not using r10k, follow whatever workflow you’ve decided on to add modules, update manifests, and track all changes in your VCS.

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