I’ve been experimenting a little more with setting up Puppet. So far, I’ve successfully been able to get Puppet up and going – and now, I’m left with the feeling OK, that was neat I guess. Now what? There’s an ocean of possibilities when it comes to Puppet and its integration points with Azure – infrastructure as code to configuration management. I’m just scratching the surface, and I’m not pretending that any of the below is anything but the fumblings of a complete newbie. Still, I wanted to share with you my list of steps in preparing Puppet on Azure – as the first in what hopefully will be a series as I use Puppet as an engine to drive my DevOps learnings. Hope this helps!

 

Setting Up Your First Puppet Master in Azure

• We need to set up Azure CLI first.
  
  • Install (using the steps in this article) node.js from the official install site. You could do this on a VM, or right on your laptop.
    
  • Command prompt – Admin privilege – run npm install azure-cli –global
    
  • Then run command azure account download
    
  • Take the file and save it somewhere convenient – I saved it to c:\junk\azure.publishsettings
    
  • Then run azure account import {filename}
    
  • I ran azure config mode arm at this point too in a command prompt.
    
• Then fill in azure account show to confirm you have the right account selected.
  
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• Now we go to VisualStudio Online – login at https://app.vssps.visualstudio.com/profile/view?mkt=en-us and go to your VSO portal.
  
• On a new tab, go to the azure portal – https://manage.windowsazure.com/
  
  
• Click New, then Compute -> Virtual Machine -> From Gallery.
  
• Then, select the Puppet Labs node, and select the latest build of Puppet Enterprise. On my build, this is 3.7.2.
  

  
  

• Choose a lower-case unique name of 3-15 characters. Standard Tier, Size at least A2, a username, and – choose a password over uploading an SSH key. This is obviously just for a demo.
  

  
  

• then fill in your other values. Always select “create a new cloud service”, and open up three ports – 1) HTTPS (port 443), Puppet (8140), and MCollective (61613)
  

  
  

• Go to a new browser window – it may take 10 minutes for this to appear and be fully provisioned/available – and access your URL. In my case, this is https://dhpuppetmaster.cloudapp.net . I don’t know yet what the password is, but I’m going to find out – in the next step.
  

  
  

• Then, open up bitvise. (I’m really pleased with this SSH client in particular, but feel free to substitute whatever you like.)
  

  
  

   

• In the prompts that follow – go ahead and save the remote hosts public key when it prompts. Use the username and password you used in originally creating the VM.
  
• In the bitvise cmd prompt window that appears – don’t you just love linux? – run sudo grep ‘auth_user_email’ /etc/puppetlabs/installer/answers.install. Write down the user information it gives you. In this case it’s admin@dhpuppetmaster.cloudapp.net
  
• Now run sudo grep ‘auth_password’ /etc/puppetlabs/installer/database_info.install
  

  
  

• Then go back and check out that URL for your Puppet master box – in my case https://dhpuppetmaster.cloudapp.net/ OMG what am I looking at here? ISn’t this great?
  

  
  

   

Setting Up a Node

 

• Now we’ve set up a Puppet Master – let’s set up a node. Create a VM – same as above, but this time let’s create a Windows Server 2012 from the Gallery. Remember to make the name lowercase – everything else can be default values.
  

  
  

• The tricky part is the last page – here you want to select the Puppet Agent checkbox. Fill in the name of your Puppet server.
  

  
  

• Then – once its done spinning up – go back to your Puppet admin window, and select Node Requests on the top right. You should see your new node’s request in the list. Approve it – and congrats! You now are all set up with a Puppet master and a node.
  
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• OK, now I have a working Puppet node and puppetmaster set of VM’s. Now what? Well, following the steps in this blog post – he had as many problems with the obtuse and overly generic Puppet documentation as I did! – I created a text file called helloworld.pp in a junk directory, copied it over to my root folder (/home/puppetadmin) using FTP, and then ran puppet apply hello_world.pp. (The contents of the .pp file are in the article link.) I’m sure I’m violating all kinds of best practices here but in the absence of better documentation – here it is.
  

   

  
  

   

• Did it work though? I RDP onto the box – look at the Endpoints tab to view the dynamically changing public endpoint for RDP –
  
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  Anddddddd I see – nothing. Wow. So, clearly I’m missing something. It’s at this point – after a few hours of fumbling around – that I am admitting I’m like a six year old with scissors here. Time to go back to the drawing board and figure out more about how Puppet likes to work – before “learning by doing”.
  

   

Links Goodness

I will continue this with some more posts later. But in the meantime, here’s some helpful URL’s that may be of use to you in your DevOps quest:

 

• Puppet on Azure video demo: https://msopentech.com/blog/2014/09/15/puppet-enterprise-on-microsoft-azure/
  
• A crappy walkthrough but lots of explicity writeup http://haishibai.blogspot.com/2014/02/walkthrough-puppet-master-in-action-on.html
  
• Great article here on pluses and minuses of Puppet vs its nearest competitor, Chef: https://www.scriptrock.com/articles/puppet-vs.-chef-revisited
  
• Editing Puppet Files in Visual Studio
  
• Using Vagrant and Puppet to Manage A Development Environment
  
• Building a Development Environment With Vagrant and Puppet