Managing agent communication in multi-region installations

Typically, when you enable a replica by using puppet infrastructure enable replica or puppet infrastructure provision replica --enable, the configuration tool automatically sets the same communication parameters for all agents. In multi-region installations, with load balancers or compilers in multiple locations, you must manually configure agent communication settings so that agents fail over to the appropriate load balancer or compiler.

To skip automatically configuring which Puppet servers and PCP brokers agents communicate with, use the --skip-agent-config flag when you provision and enable a replica, for example:

puppet infrastructure provision replica example.puppet.com --enable --skip-agent-config

To manually configure which load balancer or compiler agents communicate with, use one of these options:

• CSR attributes
  1. For each node, include a CSR attribute that identifies the location of the node, for example pp_region or pp_datacenter.
  2. Create child groups off of the PE Agent node group for each location.
  3. In each child node group, include the puppet_enterprise::profile::agent class and set the server_list parameter to the appropriate load balancer or compiler hostname.
  4. In each child node group, add a rule that uses the trusted fact created from the CSR attribute.
• Hiera

  For each node or group of nodes, create a key/value pair that sets the puppet_enterprise::profile::agent::server_list parameter to be used by the PE Agent node group.

• Custom method that sets the server_list parameter in puppet.conf.