Puppet has been maturing from a company with an enthusiastic base of users of an open source tool, to a leading provider of enterprise DevOps solutions for the last few years. Things really accelerated with the appointment last year of Sanjay Mirchandani, as CEO and the group of experienced, A+ players he brought to the executive team. Today Puppet took another step towards solidifying their position as a leading provider of enterprise DevOps solutions with a string of news announcements highlighting new products, accelerated growth and new/expanded presence.
Lets start with what for many of you will be the most important. Puppet today announced “the general availability of Puppet Enterprise 2017.2, and upcoming availability of Puppet 5 Platform, the latest version of Open Source Puppet.” I had a chance to chat with Puppet CTO Deepak Giridharagopal, Chief Product Officer, Omri Gazitt and VP of Marketing, Tim Zonca. In their considered opinion this new version of Puppet Enterprise, more than just another upgrade, may in fact be the most significant upgrade to Puppet ever.
From the press release, the most significant of these new capabilities are:
- Package inspection: Users get started with automation by quickly identifying packages that aren’t being automatically managed, but should be. With package inspection, Puppet Enterprise users report on unmanaged infrastructure, making it easy to see the systems that would benefit most from automation to ensure their most critical software has the right maintenance updates, security patches and licenses.
- Visual orchestration workflows: Users orchestrate infrastructure and application deployments entirely from within the Puppet Enterprise web UI, without writing a single line of Puppet code. Enterprises can target specific infrastructure environments using drop-down menus and filters, define workflows, monitor deployment status in real-time, and start, stop or restart deployments as needed, all with the click of a button.
Both of these are much deeper than the few words from the press release. In addition to these though, there are also even more new capabilities packed in to 2017.2. Additionally, the open source Puppet platform 5 has many new innovations and hooks that will continue to keep the large base of open Puppet users happy, if they don’t require or need the greater feature set of the enterprise version.
Speaking of those many users, that is the lead in to the second announcement. Puppet is growing and growing fast. Over the last 12 months they have added more than 250 enterprise customers to the business. Today over 37,000 companies use Puppet, with over 75 of the Fortune 100 also relying on Puppet. To help satisfy this increasing demand, Puppet announced the opening of a new Asia-Pacific office in Singapore, a large expansion of their existing office in Sydney and the opening of a new R&D center in Seattle.
Puppet also announced significant additions to its partner program and participants:
- New AWS Marketplace offering: As enterprises continue to recognize the value of cloud-based environments, they are turning to AWS and other cloud platforms for efficiency, savings and scalability. To support cloud efforts, AWS and Puppet deepened their partnership, making Puppet Enterprise available on an hourly, pay-as-you-go basis. The new offering simplifies installation, provides secure configuration and delivers immediate ROI.
- Extended Cisco partnership: As software defined networking continues to evolve as a key tenet of the modern data center, Cisco customers want the power of Puppet Enterprise as a unified way of defining, deploying and operating all the software they run. Joint customers can now buy and get support for Puppet Enterprise directly from Cisco and any Cisco VAR.
- New partners for security and DevOps: Puppet has added a number of important partners as part of its inaugural class to the Technology Alliance Partner Program (TAPP). By collaborating with F5, Splunk, Cumulus Networks, CloudPassage, Conjur, CyberArk, Onyx Point, Intelliment and Sensu, Puppet and its partners collectively deliver a better architecture around security and DevOps.
Again, all signs point to Puppet’s ascendence to enterprise provider status as it matures into its market leader position.
The third and final announcement from Puppet is by no means the least of the three. In addition to the first two announcements, Puppet also announced two new offerings, Lumogon™ and Puppet Cloud Discovery™. With these the company expands its enterprise offerings beyond Puppet Enterprise, empowering companies to overcome challenges associated with modernizing infrastructure and application stacks.
These are first offerings independent of Puppet Enterprise offered by the company. The represent significant new capabilities in two quickly growing markets, cloud and containers.
Lumogon empowers “anyone involved in running containers, like site reliability engineers (SREs), release engineers, DevOps engineers, and the application developers themselves, now have a tool to gain operational insights into what makes up their containers with Lumogon. Lumogon provides a transparent window into each Docker image and running container, and offers a way to collect, query and report on container application metadata.”
“Puppet Cloud Discovery collects and visualizes a rich set of system data to give users better awareness of the state of their infrastructure. Unlike other tools on the market that were built for traditional on-premise infrastructure, Puppet Cloud Discovery is cloud-first and is designed to model ephemeral cloud infrastructure. Puppet Cloud Discovery is delivered as a service, making it easy for users to see immediate time-to-value.”
So Puppet has raised the bar and solidified its position in the marketplace. When taken together these three announcements illustrate that Puppet is accelerating in almost every facet. It will be interesting to see how they continue to build in the months and years to come.
