Puppet Rebrands, Launches Numerous New Projects
Folks who are focused on container technology and virtual machines as they are implemented today might want to give a hat tip to some of the early technologies and platforms that arrived in the same arena. Among those, Puppet, which was built on the legacy of the venerable Cfengine system, was an early platform that helped automate lots of virtual machine implementations. We covered it in depth all the way back in 2008.
Fast-forward to today, and Puppet Labs is changing its name to mark a new era, and is out with several new product initiatives. The organization, now known as just Puppet, has also named its first president and COO, Sanjay Mirchandani, who comes to the company from VMware, where he was a senior vice-president.
Puppet is out with new products and an interoperability project. The products are Puppet Enterprise 2016.1 platform and Puppet Enterprise App for Splunk, which expands Splunk to give enterprises a view into changes in their infrastructure, seen in real time. A summary of Puppet's changes is found here.
“Software powers everything around us, from the devices on our wrists and our walls to the work we do, the fun we have, and everything in between. Modern cars are powered by millions of lines of code, our financial world is entirely mediated by software to enable speed and throughput, and it’s critical to delivery of core functions like medicine, utilities, and food. Nevertheless, most businesses take weeks, months and even years to deliver everything from simple upgrades to the latest innovations, and too much of this software is out of date, insecure, and thus a barrier to progress rather than an enabler of it,” said Luke Kanies, Puppet founder and CEO. “With Puppet, customers build highly efficient DevOps practices that automate manual processes and get control of the entire infrastructure and application stack, eliminating constraints on innovation, securing critical capabilities, and maximizing the business potential from their software investments.”
According to Puppet officials, these are details on some of the new initiatives:
Project Blueshift and Puppet Enterprise 2016.1 – Blueshift represents Puppet's engagement with leading-edge technologies and their communities — technologies like Docker, Mesos and Kubernetes — and Puppet's commitment to giving organizations the tools to build and operate constantly modern software. The new Puppet Enterprise 2016.1 gives customers direct control of — and real-time visibility into — the changes they need to push out, whether to an app running in a Kubernetes cluster or a fleet of VMs running in AWS. For complete details, read our press release.
Splunk integration – Proactive monitoring of infrastructure and applications is a key DevOps practice, enabling continuous improvement. The Puppet Enterprise App for Splunk now extends the Splunk platform to Puppet customers to diagnose issues and solve problems faster, so they can deploy critical changes with confidence. For complete details, read our press release.
There is also a blog post summarizing initiatives, which notes:
People now know what automation is, and they can name multiple tools they might use...Puppet is the clear leader in the space, and people use it to manage tens of millions of devices, from servers and switches to cloud-hosted VMs and containers, from the operating system to the application. We are a company of more than 400 people, working with people and companies around the world.
One of the most interesting, but also most challenging, parts of being at Puppet is helping our customers manage the production infrastructure they have today, while also providing a bridge to the future technology that will be in tomorrow’s production. We’ve got a great track record of helping customers deploy new tech into production, and making it work for them, but we’ve decided there’s more we can do to help customers navigate the choppy waters between the needs of today and the opportunities of tomorrow.
As a result, we’re launching the Blueshift project, which brings together Puppet staff, community, and partners to more quickly help our customers adopt any new technology as it arrives, without the normal costs of learning, iteration, and wandering around unmapped territory.
Over the past year leading up to this project, we’ve released modules to help you use Docker and Kubernetes with the same ease and security you have come to count on for the other technologies you deploy and manage with Puppet. Very recently, we and the Puppet community have added support for other new technologies, including Apache Mesos, Hashicorp Consul, Alpine Linux and CoreOS. Just as Puppet is the common language that bridges all functions and teams in the data center — compute, networking and storage — Puppet is the bridge from the technologies you rely on in production today to those you’ll build on tomorrow.