A one-stop shop for infrastructure automation?

“IT teams need a simple way to get started with automation and a solution that grows with them as their automation footprint grows. You shouldn’t have to throw away your existing scripts or tools to scale automation across your organization. Organizations need a solution that is extensible — one that complements their current automation efforts and helps them scale beyond individuals to multiple teams,” said Matt Waxman, Head of Products at Puppet. “Our latest product capabilities meet people where they are and provides a clear roadmap to expand automation across their organizations.”

Agentless automation that helps you go from simple to scale

Puppet Enterprise 2019.1 includes new features and an enhanced integration with Bolt, the company’s open source, agentless task runner. Bolt, now with YAML support, offers the easiest way to get started with automation without requiring an agent installed on a remote target. Start simple by executing existing commands and scripts written in any language across distributed infrastructure, using SSH or WinRM. Use Bolt Plans to automate complex workflows, like an application deployment, that involves multiple steps and logic.

“We love using Bolt because it leverages our existing Puppet roles and classifications allowing us to easily make changes to large groups of servers and upgrade Kubernetes clusters quicker, which is often a pain if done manually,” said Bryan Belanger, Principal Consultant at Autostructure. “With the help of Bolt, we were also able to fix more than 1,000 servers within five minutes and upgrade our Kubernetes clusters within four hours, which included coding and tasks.”

In Puppet Enterprise 2019.1, organizations get the best of both worlds - new agentless capabilities combined with Puppet’s industry-leading continuous enforcement and governance. With both agentless and agent-based capabilities, organizations get the benefits of consistency, centralized control and auditability across all of their infrastructure. Enhanced integration with Bolt enables organizations to easily add credentials and store agentless nodes alongside the rest of their inventory giving them a consolidated view of everything they have no matter where it lives. Organizations can also run tasks on agentless targets, such as network devices, enabling them to manage all of their infrastructure in a consistent way. Support for agentless device management is now available for Cisco NX-OS, Palo Alto Networks and Cisco IOS.

“We have been using Puppet for nine years and are always seeking different ways to leverage Puppet’s capabilities to automate more of our platform. Access to extensible Puppet modules for network devices enables us to expand our automation through a consistent workflow,” said Sean Millichamp, Automation Architect at Secure-24. Eric Mowry, Vice President of Engineering at Secure-24 added, “Puppet has shown over the years that it is adapting to the changing market and is providing new extensions to its platform that enhances our ability to provide a consistent environment to our clients.”

Make changes safely and at scale

New capabilities in Continuous Delivery for Puppet Enterprise provide automated and predictable processes for deploying Puppet code, enabling teams to scale their DevOps practices safely and with greater confidence.

·       The powerful Impact Analysis capability allows teams to assess the impact of a proposed Puppet code change before it is deployed. This provides immediate insight and assurance that the intended change only affects the configurations on the infrastructure where the code is being deployed.

·       Module Delivery Pipelines empowers teams to independently deploy the automation code for the infrastructure services or applications they own. Puppet module changes can now move independently through the software delivery lifecycle without blocking other modules. This eliminates the need for a central Puppet team to approve and merge changes for other teams’ infrastructure which increases delivery velocity.

·       The new Simplified Puppet Deployments capability makes it easy for non-Puppet experts to push simple infrastructure changes immediately and easily perform complex rolling deployments to a group of nodes in batches in one step

Organizations can now deploy Continuous Delivery for Puppet Enterprise capabilities directly from the Puppet Enterprise console (backported to 2018.1). Default pipelines guide organizations new to continuous delivery practices through setting up their first pipeline in under 30 minutes.

"Moving to Continuous Delivery for Puppet Enterprise has improved the reliability of our Puppet code deployments while reducing our efforts compared to our previous CI software through capabilities such as no-op runs for deployments," said Vincent Lours, Linux DevOps SysAdmin Engineer at IPG Solutions. "In the last few months, the software has drastically grown and reached a mature stage. It's now easy to manage our pipelines, as default jobs and pipelines are covering almost all of our needs. Furthermore, the built-in interactions with the Puppet Master give us a smooth way to deploy our code based on our various environments."