The Nodepool base image is created using the puppet script /dib/puppet/ciiimage.pp. It reuses operations/puppet.git and install a bunch of packages.
Then that image is pushed to labs infrastructure and used to spawn an instance out of it. The script /nodepool/scripts/setup_node.sh runs as user debian and reapply the manifest. The snapshot are recreated once per day automatically around 14:00 UTC.
A problem is that the packages are usually marked with ensure => present and they end up being frozen to the version we had when build the reference image.
I guess the setup_node.sh script should run apt-get dist-upgrade --yes to catch up.