Puppet Labs Makes Its Push into Application Orchestration

Context-Aware Apps: How to Super Charge Your Customer Engagement

Moving to take IT automation well beyond the realm of IT infrastructure, Puppet Labs today unveiled Puppet Application Orchestration software that promises to simplify the deployment and management of distributed applications.

Puppet Labs CEO Luke Kanies says IT organizations are looking for more efficient, repeatable ways to manage the software supply chain, which is becoming more complex each day. Puppet Application Orchestration makes it possible to model complicated applications and application stacks as Puppet code, which then makes it easier to push that software out across multiple distributed systems that IT organizations can then automate using existing Puppet Labs automation tools. At present, Puppet Labs already has some 3,500 free modules that organizations can use as building blocks to define an application stack.

The degree to which IT organizations are prepared to converge the management of infrastructure and applications will vary. For that reason, Kanies says Puppet Labs is making Puppet Application Orchestration software available as a separate offering that organizations can invoke on its own or implement as an extension to the existing Puppet Labs orchestration software.

At the moment, Puppet software is being used by 30,000 companies to manage as many as 50,000 nodes. Even so, Kanies says that only about 15 percent of all IT organizations have actually automated the management of IT infrastructure. As a result, Kanies says there’s still much work to be done in terms of automating both application and IT infrastructure management.

Nevertheless, as IT environments continue to grow in complexity both inside and outside of the cloud, there will be increased reliance on IT automation frameworks to manage IT systems, which are quickly achieving unprecedented levels of scale.