Starting a new Puppet Enterprise deployment: Avoid issues and make scaling easier

I downloaded Puppet Enterprise and am going to build a deployment. How can I avoid issues and make sure I’m ready to scale?

Version and installation information

PE version: All supported versions

Solution

To avoid issues with your new deployment and make scaling easier:

• Get the deployment you want by using the right hardware and tuning
• Automate maintenance, make scaling easier, and avoid performance issues
• Make working with code easier by using Code Manager
• Recover easily by creating backups
• Use the current long term support or latest version of PE

Get the deployment you want by using the right hardware and tuning

By ensuring that your hardware and tuning match the deployment that you want to build, you can prevent issues with your deployment and scale it to a large number of nodes when needed.

Make sure that you meet the hardware and tuning match the deployment and learn how to tune your deployment from our documentation.

Automate maintenance and make scaling easier with modules

• Automate tuning, maintaining, and backing up Puppet Enterprise databases with the puppetlabs-pe_databases module.

• Identify and solve performance issues as your infrastructure scales by collecting metrics about PE’s performance over time with the puppetlabs-puppet_metrics_collector module.

Make working with code easier by using Code Manager

By using Code Manager, you can centralize your code.

This makes it easier to:

• Give your developers appropriate access
• Audit code
• Upgrade or migrate your infrastructure

Get started with Code Manager.

Recover easily by making backups

Backing up important files in your infrastructure can help you migrate more easily to a new primary server (called the master in older versions of PE), troubleshoot, and quickly recover in the case of system failures.

• Back up Puppet Enterprise databases with the puppetlabs-pe_databases module.
• Back up your code by using version control.
• Take regular backups of the primary server.
• If you're manually backing up your deployment, back up this list of files.

Make sure all of your agents don’t check in simultaneously

After you’ve added hundreds of nodes to your deployment you may notice that your agents are running slow or timing out. When hundreds of nodes check in simultaneously to request a catalog, it might cause a thundering herd of processes that causes CPU and memory performance to suffer.

Stop and prevent thundering herd by using the solutions in Diagnose, stop, and prevent a thundering herd for Puppet Enterprise.

Get new features and bug fixes by keeping Puppet Enterprise up to date

Keep Puppet Enterprise up to date to get new features and bug fixes. We release updates for Puppet Enterprise regularly. Learn more about new features, enhancements, deprecations, known issues, and bug fixes by reading release notes to decide if upgrading is right for you. You are always encouraged to be in production on either a long term support (LTS) or currently supported version of PE.