In Puppet Labs’ first major release since its acquisition of MCollective, we have some renewed open cloud initiatives emerging onto the scene.  MCollective was already an incorporated feature for Puppet Labs’ products, and today’s release further integrates MCollective into the fold.

MCollective version 1.0 is a command line interface (CLI) for asking real-time questions about network and queue tasks that are coming into a Puppet Master, which is the central coordination server in a Puppet product deployment.

The new tool aids in the centralized management of Puppet, the Labs’ open source data center automation and configuration management framework, which is something a lot of businesses, small and large, are taking an interest in. Combining the best of both worlds, MCollective’s first major release with Puppet adds an important time element to the way systems are managed.  Overall, this can greatly improve IT productivity, and that’s something every manager wants to hear.

“We are excited about the immediate progress with MCollective,” said Luke Kanies, CEO of Puppet. “We have seen a lot of interest in the product and its ability to make queries from a command line interface. We will continue to invest in its future development as part of our effort to make sys admins and IT departments more productive.”

Two important areas MCollective is focusing on is communication (as far as moving around data goes), and scalability.  The two work hand in hand, with scalability greatly enhancing the communication platform as part of Puppet Labs’ bigger picture.  MCollective is designed specifically to help you manage those communication issues, as they related to direct socket infrastructure, document requesting, etc., which gets tricky for servers running beyond capacity.

MCollective also improves how Puppet works with managing applications on existing systems. MCollective’s real-time discovery capabilities enhance the Puppet Dashboard, simplifying how users schedule complex sequences of activities using data available from the Puppet platform.

“I am pleased with the level of support the project has received and the speed with which Puppet Labs and the Puppet community have embraced MCollective,” said R.I. Pienaar, founder of The Marionette Collective. “The real-time capabilities of MCollective are already influencing Puppet’s approach to data center automation.”