San Diego, CA – October 20, 2016 – Puppet, the standard for automating the delivery and
operation of the software that powers everything around us, today at PuppetConf
announced the availability of major updates to Puppet Enterprise 2016.4, including a new
integration with Jenkins. New reporting capabilities give teams significantly greater visibility
into change, while new orchestration capabilities intelligently enable teams to segment
their infrastructure and execute phased deployments so they can deploy faster, more
frequently and more reliably. With this latest release, Puppet Enterprise deepens the
foundation for building DevOps practices by making it easier than ever to gain situational
awareness and orchestrate software change confidently, no matter what your software
runs on.
“In today’s software-driven world, organizations need to ship new releases fast and error
free,” said Jamie Hull, vice president of product at Puppet. “Making things even more
difficult, they need to be able to do both these things in increasingly complex, mixed
environments. The latest features in Puppet Enterprise help our customers confidently
navigate this complexity by providing more direct control over deployments, as well as
greater insight into what changed on their systems, why and by whom.”
Richer Situational Awareness
All too often, changes to infrastructure and applications can be a black box, with little
visibility into who changed what and when, heightening security risks as a result. It’s critical
to understand what’s happening across all your software so you can more effectively react
and take control directly and confidently. While many tools can tell when a change
occurred and what changed, they don’t have the situational awareness to tell you why
something changed or who changed it.
Without this awareness into the state of infrastructure, and the origins and impact of
changes, it’s difficult for organizations to deploy change confidently. This is especially
problematic for large organizations with independent teams that span infrastructure and
applications.
Puppet Enterprise 2016.4 solves this problem by providing deeper visibility into the cause
of change across an organization's infrastructure with reporting that identifies intentional
changes (changes you’ve defined) versus corrective or unexpected changes (manual but
unplanned changes or configuration drift), which Puppet is designed to automatically
correct.
● Know exactly when unexpected changes occur so you can alert security teams
quickly when needed, troubleshoot faster and reduce mean time to recover.
● Drill into specific configuration resources to understand exactly when unexpected
changes occur and what changed to identify potential security issues faster.
● Know whether changes occurring across infrastructure are the result of drift from a
desired state to identify lapses in process within an organization’s use of Puppet.
Orchestrate Phased Deployments with Puppet
Modern infrastructure and applications are incredibly complex, which can make it difficult
to maintain centralized control and quickly and reliably deploy changes in a way that
accounts for all infrastructure dependencies. Traditional approaches to orchestration lead
to conflicting configurations or undocumented, ad-hoc changes because they lack the
intelligence of dependencies and the automated workflows to ensure that proposed
changes won’t cause failures.
Puppet Enterprise 2016.4 gives organizations full and direct control to drive change
confidently and easily orchestrate ordered deployments across infrastructure and
applications. This approach reduces risk when rolling out changes by running phased
(canary) deployments, whether to an isolated set of your infrastructure, a specific
application or your entire data center. With Puppet Enterprise, IT teams now can:
● Orchestrate phased deployments of change by targeting specific portions of their
infrastructure and applications for updates.
● Segment their infrastructure and applications based on any facts stored in Puppet,
such as location, environment, configuration resources applied, resource events
(successful vs. failed changes, time of most recent Puppet run), and deploy changes
only to those targeted segments.
● Gain even more control to run phased deployments and execute coordinated roll-
outs of change.
Puppet Enterprise 2016.4 is available today.
Optimizing the Software Delivery Pipeline with Jenkins Integration
Increasingly, IT teams are seeking to adopt agile practices with a unified DevOps toolchain
that includes automated configuration management, orchestration and continuous
integration. A new integration with Jenkins enables Puppet Enterprise and Jenkins users to
combine the continuous delivery and automation strengths of both solutions to build
continuous delivery pipelines with an “everything as code” approach to software delivery.
The Jenkins Pipeline plugin for Puppet Enterprise enables IT teams to build continuous
delivery pipelines in Jenkins, with Puppet Enterprise orchestrating all application and
infrastructure deployment tasks. Using the plugin, Jenkins users can set up continuous
integration pipelines and push and create Puppet orchestration jobs targeting
deployments to specific applications or portions of the infrastructure.
Additional resources
● Read about all the exciting PuppetConf announcements.
● Follow PuppetConf on Twitter @PuppetConf and #puppetconf.
● Learn more about Puppet.
● Try Puppet Enterprise for free.
About Puppet
Puppet is driving the movement to a world of unconstrained software change. Its
revolutionary platform is the industry standard for automating the delivery and operation
of the software that powers everything around us. More than 33,000 companies —
including more than 75 percent of the Fortune 100 — use Puppet’s open source and
commercial solutions to adopt DevOps practices, achieve situational awareness and drive
software change with confidence. Based in Portland, Oregon, Puppet is a privately held
company with more than 470 employees around the world. Learn more at puppet.com.
