Puppet Labs Announces Support for OpenStack

At the OpenStack Summit in San Francisco today, Puppet Labs, an IT automation software provider for system administrators, and its partners Cisco, Morphlabs and eNovance launched OpenStack configuration modules for Puppet Labs’ products, Puppet open source and Puppet Enterprise. OpenStack is an open source cloud operating system, created by Rackspace and NASA, and which has a fast-growing community of users and developers.

"Our customers wanted a Puppet solution to deploy and manage OpenStack," said Luke Kanies, co-founder and CEO of Puppet Labs. "They needed something to get OpenStack up and running and then manage it."

Puppet Labs has worked closely with Rackspace since the infancy of OpenStack, noting that Rackspace's OpenStack Cloud was built using Puppet. So it was a natural fit for Puppet. But Puppet's founder pointed out that the company's focus is not narrowing, but widening. "We're tech agnostic," Kanies explained. Puppet can be deployed to managed cloud implementations of Amazon Web Services or VMWare ones. "We want to help system admins win," he said.

Ready for Prime Time

Today's announcement marks one of the first OpenStack implementations suitable for enterprise-class production deployments. The modules provide enterprise-ready IT automation for OpenStack’s compute, object storage, and image service capabilities. "We focused on core pieces," Kanies said. "The ones that help the system admins in getting up and running, then we can add peripheral pieces."

The first of these OpenStack configuration modules - related to cloud provisioning - is immediately available for free download from Puppet Forge, Puppet Labs’ online marketplace. All of the Puppet OpenStack configuration modules will be available for free download from Puppet Forge, and others will be published over the next 60 days.

Puppet Labs will be presenting two workshops at the conference, which Kanies described as "real meaty tech talks."

"We have the code to show right there to customers and collaborators,," said Kanies. "The timing was great. The entire OpenStack community will be there." He said Puppet Lab's goal is to bring the modules to as wide an audience as possible. He added that it is very effective to get feedback directly from the OpenStack community and let them know "we've got a the start of a great solution, they don't have to start their own separate solution."

Cloud Yodas

Morphlabs, provider of solutions for enterprises and service providers deploying public and private clouds, was a partner in today's announcement. Yoram Heller, VP of Corporate Development for Morphlabs, said his company has been rolling out cloud tools since 2007 and working closely with Puppet. "At this point, we're 'cloud Yodas,'" he said. Heller said Morphlabs has been using Puppet for a long time because its tools enable predictable deployments.

"We are talking massive web scale, where you need to automate the process to globally deploy patches and software updates. Puppet saves massive amounts of time, and gives us assurable, predictable deployments across racks and racks, thousands of machines," Heller said. "Puppet also has a vibrant and growing community. In choosing Puppet, there really wasn't much competition. We went with Puppet because they have never failed us."

eNovance, a cloud services and solutions provider, is both a contributor to and user of Puppet Labs’ OpenStack configuration modules. “Our customers desired the elasticity benefits of public cloud, but the security of on-premise solutions,” said Loïc Dachary, eNovance Chief Research Officer. “They also require robust, scalable IT automation infrastructure. Only with Puppet Labs’ OpenStack configuration modules are we able to satisfy these requirements, and the vibrant community insures there’ll be ongoing innovation and development.”