Currently the puppet module is not idempotent, and so puppet is usually disabled and so running puppet ocassionally will cause a huge batch of issues that the wikimetrics team does not want to deal with (running your own puppetmaster is going to cause a lot of pain unless you are actually playing with puppet). Solution is to make the puppet module properly idempotent, and then it can run without having to be its own puppetmaster.
The plan is to move this to use puppet for infrastructure and fabric to automate deployment.