Enterprise IT automation solution provider Puppet Labs will announce version 2.0 of its flagship Puppet Enterprise product at its PuppetConf event today. Most notably, the version brings support for provisioning virtual machines directly on Amazon EC2 or VMware.

“Puppet has always integrated with existing provision tools,” CEO Luke Kanies explained in an interview. “But most virtualization systems have an API for provisioning, so Puppet users can now provision VMs directly.”

Here’s a run down of what’s new in Puppet 2.0, from the company’s official announcement:

• New graphical user console provides an intuitive way for systems administrators to
  leverage the power of Puppet. Right out of the box, it enables agile response and rapid
  scaling by locating existing resources in the network and cloning them to new nodes,
  maintaining continuous configuration management as the infrastructure expands.
• Provisioning capabilities make it easy for systems administrators to quickly scale
  infrastructure using Amazon’s EC2 cloud service or VMware in their own data centers.
• New orchestration capabilities give systems administrators “command and control”
  power to efficiently make parallel changes across clusters of nodes with just a single
  command.
• New baselining capabilities enable systems administrators to monitor their
  infrastructure’s compliance against a desired-state, a critical input to comprehensive
  change management and auditing processes.

Puppet is at the forefront of the DevOps movement – a loosely connected community of developers and operations staff working together to improve the way development and operations work together. Puppet is becoming the gold standard for IT automation and is a staple in the DevOps toolkit.

Services Angle

Puppet’s new relevant as enterprises start to shift resources from on-premise data centers to cloud service providers. Cloud adoption and DevOps are symbiotic phenomena, each helping enable the other. Virtual infrastructure allows both operations and development to work more quickly and automate more tasks. Support for EC2 and VMware is a major step forward for Puppet, and probably just the beginning.