Cloud automation and management - Puppet Labs Enterprise 3.0

I've spoken with the folks at Puppet Labs in the past as well as a number of their customers. What I've taken away is that the tools the company offers are designed with the help of developers and system operations and administration teams themselves. 

This time, the company is launching Puppet Enterprise 3.0, a new release of their well-received Puppet Enterprise.

What Puppet has to say about Enterprise 3.0

Here's what Puppet has to say about the new release of Puppet Enterprise:

• Scalability and Performance- With today's on-demand and flexible cloud architecture, customers expect to create and manage hundreds—or even thousands—of applications and virtual machines in just minutes.

   

  Puppet Enterprise 3.0 offers unmatched performance and scalability to help customers move faster and meet the growing demand for cloud applications.

  Puppet Enterprise customers can expect a nearly 200 percent increase in performance from the latest release, allowing them to respond to business changes more quickly. They can also expect a nearly 100 percent scalability improvement, enabling them to manage twice as many cloud nodes in the same deployment.

   

• Orchestration- It's almost impossible to discover and manage large numbers of virtual, transient cloud nodes with traditional methods, such as configuration management databases (CMDBs), custom scripts and spreadsheets.

   

  The orchestration engine in Puppet Enterprise 3.0 has new capabilities tailored for customers automating cloud infrastructure, enabling them to efficiently discover and then orchestrate complex management operations on large volumes of cloud nodes.

  Using the orchestration engine's fully dynamic and pluggable discovery service, Puppet Enterprise customers can take advantage of any data source or real-time query results to quickly locate, identify and group cloud nodes.

  Customers can also use the orchestration engine's new progressive deployment capability to deploy changes in phases, testing at each stage and so minimizing the risk of rolling out changes to production.

   

• Software-Defined Infrastructure- The management of compute, network and storage resources is typically siloed into separate organizations using separate tools, which slows time to production. Puppet Enterprise 3.0 enables IT teams to deploy cloud applications faster, with fewer errors, by providing a unified, software-defined approach to automating management of compute, network and storage resources.

   

  Today, pre-built configurations for automating Juniper, Cisco, NetApp, and many others devices are freely available on the Puppet Forge , Puppet Labs’ online repository of more than 1,200 ready-to-run configurations.

Additional Key Capabilities of Puppet Enterprise 3.0

• Discover and Browse Resources- Puppet Enterprise's graphical user interface enables customers to easily discover and browse any and all service resources throughout their infrastructure, in real time.

   

   

• Enterprise Platform Support- Customers can now get full functionality support across all major enterprise platforms, including Microsoft Windows, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, IBM AIX, Solaris, and all major Linux distributions.

   

   

• Reusability of 1,200+ Puppet Forge modules -  Customers can now take advantage of pre-built configurations available on the Puppet Forge, without the need to modify modules for their specific environments.

Snapshot analysis

I've spoken with a number of users of Puppet Labs' software and have yet to have heard a complaint. To a person, the comments are positive and point out that although it takes a while to learn all of the features and capabilities offered by the software, Puppet Labs Enterprise gets the job done. They will almost always point out that if the software doesn't meet some specific requirement that a company has, there are ways to either use extensions created by other users of Puppet Enterprise or build it in-house.

Puppet finds itself in a very noisy, complex market for management, automation and orchestration tools. Suppliers such as IBM, HP, Microsoft, and VMware offer tools that target their own installed base. Suppliers such as BMC, CA and many others are offering tools that target specific problems. Puppet has taken a very pragmatic, focused approach to their market and has not tired to be everything to everyone, everywhere, always.

Puppet's approach has been to directly address administrators, operators and developers rather than putting on flashy, costly marketing events designed to reach IT management. They've relied on the fact that their tools have been designed by the people needing to manage, automate and orchestrate complex environments to win over potential users of the software.

If your organization has a complex environment that includes physical, virtual and remote/cloud resources and you're at wits end trying to keep things under control, it would be wise to try the free download out and see if it will make life simpler.