Puppet Inc. today unveiled new capabilities for its popular automation platform to help administrators find and seize upon opportunities to improve the efficiency of their companies’ infrastructure faster.

The arguably biggest addition is Continuous Delivery for Puppet Enterprise. As the name implies, the tool provides the ability to create continuous delivery pipelines, automated workflows for testing and rolling out code.

Sparing developers the hassle of handling the process manually frees them up to spend more time on programming, thus speeding up projects. Continuous Delivery for Puppet Enterprise applies the same idea to streamlining the creation of infrastructure automation scripts in Puppet’s platform. The product features a visual interface that, according to the company, makes it possible to set up a continuous delivery pipeline in a few minutes.

Continuous Delivery for Puppet Enterprise debuted alongside enhancements to Puppet Tasks. The latter tool, which was introduced last year, is designed to help with the implementation of infrastructure changes that must be applied in a specific order. An administrator might, for example, want to install an update on a handful of servers to ensure that everything works as expected before rolling it out to the entire data center.

Puppet Tasks now has a new access control mechanism for restricting activity based on user roles. Thanks to the feature, a company can group infrastructure assets based on factors such as what division they belong to and only let authorized administrators make changes.

The new features are accessible via a revamped command line interface that Puppet said brings several usability improvements. More notably, the company also added in a backup feature that allows administrators to make a copy of a Puppet deployment directly from the console. The goal is to let operations teams quickly restore their environments in case they encounter issues while upgrading to a new version of the automation platform.

Most of the new features are available immediately with the exception of Continuous Delivery for Puppet Enterprise, which is set to launch in June. The company also announced plans to release another new tool called Puppet Discovery next month. The latter offering, which was first introduced late last year as a preview, focuses on making it easier for administrators to find infrastructure assets they could automate. 

Image: Puppet/Flickr