Puppet 3.2 Adds Content Modules, Speeds Deployment

IT automation provider Puppet Labs has release Puppet enterprise 3.2 which includes some new capabilities to help customers provision and scale faster. The company has seen the concept of DevOps spread wider within organizations and to larger enterprises. Version 3.2 continues the shift of Puppet to be application-centric, rather than node-centric.

“As organizations struggle with rapidly increasing node counts and the time pressures of meeting customer demands, reducing cycle-time is becoming more critical,“ said Luke Kanies, founder and CEO of Puppet Labs. “Puppet Enterprise 3.2 addresses these challenges by significantly reducing the time it takes our customers to deliver new value – quickly and with confidence.”

Version 3.2 includes the first set of supported modules to help teams get up and running. The new modules were selected from over 2,000 modules from Puppet Forge, and include modules to help with time synchronization across nodes, help setting up database services, manage web servers and control windows components.

“Eighty to ninety percent of the work you do is the same as every one else,” said Nigel Kersten, CIO of Puppet Labs. “Let us commoditize that and let you concentrate on the 20 percent of the rest.”

The company also simplified deploying and upgrading agents by leveraging native OS packaging systems. “Along similar lines, we’ve streamlined the deployment of enterprise agents,” said Kersten. “An enterprise now saves 2,3,4 minutes with every agent. It helps expand, breakdown silos, particularly in cloud environments when provisioning is critical. The general approach of 3.2 is streamlining everything.”

Version 3.2 comes with Razor, available in a tech preview. Razor is a next generation physical and virtual hardware provisioning solution.  IT teams can improve the speed of provisioning bare metal and scale infrastructure to meet increasing demand with Puppet Enterprise’s rules-based approach. Razor includes the ability to automatically discover bare-metal hardware, dynamically configure OS and/or hypervisors and hand off to Puppet Enterprise for workload configuration through policy-based automation.

The Tech Preview will enable customers using racked and stacked machines that want to save time turning bare metal into hypervisors and servers through automation to get early access to upcoming provisioning innovations and the ability to provide feedback and influence future capabilities.

“What we did in (previous version) Puppet 3.1 was set the stage that we were application centric rather than node centric,” said Kersten. “That foundation in 3.1 plus the building blocks of new content, means people with no automation at all can get going pretty quickly.”

Other new features include increasing partner support, this version bringing in Oracle Solaris 11 support. Solaris joins Microsoft Windows, IBM, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, AIX, Debian, Ubuntu and others. Puppet users can run agents in 3.2 as non-root, enabling users who don’t have root access to realize productivity gains through automation, extending the capabilities of Puppet Enterprise beyond infrastructure teams to other groups such as app developers to app developers, DBAs and teams using outsourced infrastructure. It also comes with over 300 fixes and improvements to provide better overall stability and performance.