DevOps automation company Puppet Inc. is adding new features and integrations designed to help information technology teams deliver modern software applications more easily and deploy them at scale.

Puppet has emerged as one of the most popular automation platforms around, offering a range of services that automate the delivery and optimization of modern software applications. The bulk of its services are bundled with its flagship Puppet Enterprise platform and serve to manage infrastructure and applications as they move across the software delivery pipeline.

With Puppet Enterprise, the underlying infrastructure is automated via code that optimizes things such as servers and virtual machines. The platform also helps to automate functions such as code review, testing, continuous integration and deployment in order to accelerate the development process.

The latest release, Puppet Enterprise 2019.1, features an integration with the open-source, agentless task runner, called Bolt. With Bolt, it’s possible to automate the manual work needed to maintain applications’ underlying infrastructure. For example, it can be used to automate tasks such as troubleshooting systems, deploying new applications and stopping and restarting individual services.

The power of Bolt is not to be underestimated, according to Bryan Belanger, a principal consultant at IT automation firm Autostructure. He said his company uses Bolt on a regular basis to upgrade its servers and Kubernetes clusters.

“With the help of Puppet Bolt, we were able to fix more than 1,000 servers within five minutes and upgrade our Kubernetes clusters within four hours, which included coding and tasks,” Belanger said.

The Bolt integration further allows users to automate the role of specific networking devices so this infrastructure can be managed in a more consistent way, the company said.

Additional updates to Puppet’s portfolio are focused on helping IT teams roll out new code safely and at a much greater scale than previously possible. For example, the new Impact Analysis tool can be used to assess the impact of code changes before they’re deployed. Module Delivery Pipelines meanwhile, allows teams to deploy custom automation code for their infrastructure and apps.

“Puppet module changes can now move independently through the software delivery lifecycle without blocking other modules,” the company said. “This eliminates the need for a central Puppet team to approve and merge changes for other teams’ infrastructure which increases delivery velocity.”

There’s also a new Simplified Puppet Deployments feature, which allows nonskilled personnel to make simple changes to their infrastructure and deploy new versions of their apps.

Puppet Enterprise 2019.1 is the company’s first major release since it landed a $42 million round of funding in June 2018. The new version will be available starting May 7.

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