So puppet lets you assign agents to 'environments', but that is done at the agent level. But of course you cannot manage the agent config until it has connected to the server to gets its node config blah blah blah catch 22. so i'm going to modify /etc/default/puppet to look like this in my custom ami in order to be able to pass in the environmen…

.etc.default.puppet

# Defaults for puppet - sourced by /etc/init.d/puppet

# Enable puppet agent service?
# Setting this to "yes" allows the puppet agent service to run.
# Setting this to "no" keeps the puppet agent service from running.
START=yes

for x in $(facter ec2_userdata); do
  case $x in
    puppet_environment*)
      PUPPET_ENVIRONMENT=$(echo $x | cut -d= -f2)
      ;;
  esac
done

# Startup options
if [ -n "$PUPPET_ENVIRONMENT" ]; then
  DAEMON_OPTS="--environment=$PUPPET_ENVIRONMENT"
else
  DAEMON_OPTS=""
fi