Puppet Labs Extends IT Automation Reach

Six Trends Shaping the Data Center in 2015

Moving to extend the reach of its IT automation portfolio into new realms, Puppet Labs today announced an upgrade to Puppet Enterprise that adds support for Amazon Web Services, bare metal servers, Docker containers and actual application code.

Tim Zonca, director of product marketing at Puppet Labs, says that as organizations become more comfortable with an integrated DevOps process, they are looking for tools that make it easier for them to manage IT at scale. That means not only managing application code, but also emerging technologies such as Docker containers, regardless of where they happen to be running.

Support for application code within version 3.8 of Puppet Enterprise is being delivered via a new Puppet Code Manager application that is based on the r10k software that Puppet has implemented to manage workflow processes. As such, Zonca says that Puppet Labs has been able to implement functions such as version control within Puppet Code Manager in a way that enables organizations to start consolidating application code management tools.

The end result, says Zonca, is that IT managers no longer have to be rocket scientists to manage increasingly diverse IT environments. In fact, Zonca says one of the primary benefits of IT automation is that it allows organizations to make more changes to the IT environment, while also eliminating errors, because crucial repeatable processes have all been automated.

At this point, there’s no getting away from the fact that IT environments are getting more complex and it’s getting harder to tell where one data center environment leaves off and another begins. The challenge is to rise to that complexity and manage IT in such a way that fewer mistakes are made than ever before.