Running Puppet inside containers

If a container can contain a whole operating system, such as Ubuntu, you might be wondering: Can't I just run Puppet inside the container?

You can, and some people do take this approach to managing containers. It also has a number of advantages:

• You can use your existing Puppet manifests or Forge modules; there is no need to write complex Dockerfiles
• Puppet will keep the container continuously updated; there is no need to rebuild when something changes

Of course, there are a few disadvantages too:

• Installing Puppet inflates the image size considerably and pulls in all sorts of dependencies
• Running Puppet slows down the build process and also consumes resources in the running container

There are also some hybrid options, such as running Puppet in the container during the build stage, and then removing Puppet and its dependencies, plus any intermediate build artifacts, before saving the final image.

Puppet's image_build module is a promising new way of...