DevOps and information technology automation software provide Puppet Inc. has announced what it calls its most significant set of product enhancements in years, building orchestration capabilities into an enhanced user interface and improving visibility into the operating environment in which software packages run, particularly in containers.

The features are included in Puppet Enterprise 2017.2. The company’s core open source platform, Puppet 5 Platform, is also being enhanced with a more powerful common language to deliver and orchestrate software.

User interface enhancements significantly expand Puppet’s potential audience, said Tim Zonca, vice president of worldwide marketing. “We’ve done a massive set of work in the web user interface to add the power of orchestrations,” he said. “Up to this point you had to be a Puppet high priest to understand how to use these features.”

Users getting started with automation can now quickly identify packages that aren’t being automatically managed, but should be, the company said. Package inspection for Puppet Enterprise users enables them to report on unmanaged infrastructure in order to identify systems that would benefit most from automation of things like maintenance updates, security patches and licenses.

Visual orchestration workflows enable users to orchestrate infrastructure and application deployments entirely from within the Puppet Enterprise web interface without writing any code. Enterprises can target specific infrastructure environments using drop-down menus and filters, define workflows, monitor deployment status in real-time and quickly start/stop/restart deployments with a single click.

Open-source upgrades

A new feature in the open-source version of Puppet’s platform for container users is Lumogon, a reporting tool that collects metadata on running containers and generates graphical reports. It can generate reports about the operating systems and all software installed in a running container. The feature is described as useful for debugging a container and for preparing an application for deployment in a target environment.

While containers are all the rage in the development world right now, they’re also “a black box,” said Deepak Giridharagopal, Puppet’s chief technology architect. “Developers can put anything they want into them, but that makes it hard to do discovery and package inspection.” Lumogon does more than just report on containers, he said. “We can inspect all containers to see what users are provisioned and what services are up and down. If there’s a vulnerability in a package, users want to know what’s running alongside of it.”

Users can query metadata information across all containers and images in an environment, making it possible to see infrastructure in aggregate and over time. Development teams can also scale queries and reports as the number of containers increases without adding new tools. Information about individual containers can be shared with other management or monitoring tools to build a complete view of the container infrastructure, Puppet Labs said.

Better cloud visibility

Finally, Puppet is adding orchestration features to cloud deployments with Puppet Cloud Discovery, a software as a service that collects and visualizes the state of cloud infrastructure. Puppet Cloud Discovery was designed from the ground up for the cloud and its ephemeral infrastructure.

“Customers told us the place they have the least optics is in the cloud because it’s so easy to spin up infrastructure,” Giridharagopal said. “As a result, they don’t necessarily understand what they have.” The new service interrogates running cloud instances to find out their characteristics. “We can the build up analytics processes so customers can fine-tune their automation,” he said.
Lumogon is free and available today. A limited preview of Puppet Cloud Discovery will be available later this month and included in Puppet Enterprise licenses.

Puppet also said it broadened its international footprint with the opening of three new regional offices, including one in Singapore, along with a larger facility in Sydney and new research and development.

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