Table of Contents

The term "environment"

The term "environment" is heavily overloaded when discussing SIMP, Puppet, DevOps, and IT in general.  We attempt to make the following distinctions:

Puppet environment directory

• A single directory at $codedir/environments/<environment_name>
• r10k deploy creates one Puppet environment directory per control repository branch.
• r10k puppetfile install (using default settings) can be run at the top level a Puppet environment directory to deploy its modules from the local Puppetfile.
  
  

Puppet environment 

• A single conceptual Puppet environment
• Acts as a global namespace, with its own site manifest(s), modules, Hiera data (Hiera 4+), and Hiera hierarchy (Hiera 5+).
• Derives its (deployed) assets from a Puppet environment directory
• The standard Puppet sense of an "environment" when Puppet/PE operates independently from SIMP.

Extra (Secondary and Writable) environment directories

• Secondary env dir: /var/simp/environments/<environment_name>

  • Home of rsync/ and site_files/pki_files/files/keydist/

• Writable env dir: /opt/puppetlabs/server/data/puppetserver/simp/environments/
  • Home of gen_passwd/ and ssh_autokeys/
  • Used as a location that server-side functions (like passgen()) are guaranteed to be able to use for saving state.
• Secondary and Writable environment directories pose a problem for Puppet scaling:
  • Load-balanced compile masters must keep the contents of both secondary environment directories in sync on both compile masters
  • In the future, filesystem alternatives like libkv may provide a way to solve the scaling problems these extra environments pose.

Secondary  environment

• Assets and information SIMP needs to:
  • support a specific Puppet environment
  • maintain independently from the Puppet environment directory
    • This includes git-unfriendly files, such as secrets (e.g., keydist/), and large files distributed by rsync.
• Sourced from the secondary environment directories

Writable environment

• Puppet server-generated environment-specific SIMP data (e.g., passgen() data)
  • data is generated automatically by Puppet functions during catalog compilation
  • written to/sourced from the Writable environment directories
• This includes master-generated data (e.g., passgen()), git-unfriendly secrets (e.g., keydist/), and files distributed by rsync

SIMP "Extra" environment 

• The combined Secondary environment + Writable environment of the same name
• (We probably need a better name for this)

SIMP "Omni" environment

• The combined Puppet environment + SIMP Extra (Secondary + Writable) environment of the same name
• (We might need a better name for this)

Infrastructure environment

• A local site's dedicated internal infrastructure tier
• Exists independently from Puppet
• Often named something along the lines of "development," "testing, "acceptance," "staging," "production", etc.,
• In Puppet circles, this is sometimes referred to an infrastructure as an "application tier" or "permanent test environment"

Environment

• Ambiguous as ever, and could mean any of the above
• Unless context suggests otherwise, probably means "Puppet environment"

References

• (Source for https://draw.io diagrams: simp_environments.xml)