Puppet defines the path to Pervasive Automation

Puppet’s State of DevOps research shows that, although organisations successfully deliver business outcomes with DevOps practices and modern automation, success is often isolated to specific teams within much larger IT organisations. The next era of automation is about scaling that automation success to transform how companies operate.

“The conversation is shifting from talking about how every company is a software company to instead focus on what’s needed to drive that transformation,” said Omri Gazitt, chief product officer, Puppet. “Puppet’s product portfolio gives companies what they need to use automation as the foundation of that change, across every domain—infrastructure, applications, cloud, containers, and networking devices. Today, we’re introducing new automation products that help companies take control of their journey to pervasive automation.”

Taking the first step to pervasive automation with the new Puppet Discovery

Not knowing what’s in a company’s IT inventory is often the first hurdle that prevents teams from getting started with automation. The journey to pervasive automation starts with discovering existing resources. Now, with one of the newest additions to the Puppet portfolio, Puppet Discovery, users can discover and take action on what’s running across their IT estate. It’s the only product that treats traditional, cloud, and container-based infrastructure and applications as first-class citizens. It features an intuitive dashboard that provides insights about infrastructure—and gives users the power to automate and manage it. Puppet Discovery will be generally available in mid-May 2018.

“Splunk customers are always looking for data to enrich their IT operations. With Puppet Discovery, we have a great data source that gives us the ability to provide even richer analytical capabilities to our joint customers, helping turn insight into action so problems get resolved quickly,” said Rick Fitz, senior vice president and general manager, IT Markets, Splunk. “We look forward to continuing our partnership with Puppet to provide customers with the ability to drive change across their entire organisation.”

Scaling automation success with Puppet Enterprise 2018.1

The latest version of Puppet Enterprise includes enhancements that empower customers with the breadth and depth they need to automate infrastructure faster and more securely. New functionality includes:

?      Puppet Tasks role-based access control, which allows users to define node groups corresponding to business functions or units, and offers fine-grained control over who can run tasks across these node groups.

?      Puppet Bolt integration with Puppet Orchestrator enables users to run Bolt task plans—a set of tasks run in a specific sequence as part of an orchestrated deployment—against hundreds of thousands of Puppet Enterprise nodes using the highly scalable Puppet Orchestrator. The execution of those plans can be tracked in the Puppet Enterprise console.

?      A faster, more user-friendly console that delivers significant accessibility improvements for users with a screen reader, that work exclusively with a keyboard or that see color uniquely.

?      Support of Puppet Development Kit (PDK) for Puppet Enterprise, including support for the new resource API, which makes it easier for Puppet developers to create custom types and providers, and allows for agentless operations.

?      Simplified backup and recovery features that provide an added layer of automation for disaster recovery and ongoing business continuity efforts.

Unifying Dev and Ops with Continuous Delivery for Puppet Enterprise

Organisations have struggled to break down traditional Dev and Ops silos because these teams rely on disconnected processes and tools to automate infrastructure and application delivery. New to the Puppet Enterprise family is Continuous Delivery for PE. The new offering brings the continuous integration, continuous delivery (CI/CD) experience that developers love to the world of infrastructure-as-code, helping standardise the way customers deliver their infrastructure. Ops teams can now use the same tools and interface as their dev teams to build, test and promote Puppet code through a standardised delivery pipeline. Continuous Delivery for Puppet Enterprise will be available in June.

Bringing pervasive automation to the cloud, networking and security

Customers need technology breadth and depth, and Puppet is helping them automate manual, error-prone process across whatever they have—traditional infrastructure, cloud, containers, networking and application development. Today, Puppet introduced new additions to its partner ecosystem, including new collaborations and innovations with Barracuda, Cisco, Microsoft and Nutanix to extend pervasive automation across on-premises and cloud environments.