Puppet Labs has announced the release of Puppet Enterprise 3.3, the commercially supported Puppet release, and the creation of the Puppet Supported certification program, providing fully tested, certified and supported solutions for managing compute, network and storage resources.
Puppet Enterprise 3.3 simplifies the process of getting nodes under management, expands the list of tested and supported modules in Puppet Forge, and extends support to additional platforms. In this new version, a web-based installer is introduced and the native remote package repository agent installation method is extended to support AIX, Solaris 10 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.
The list of officially supported operating systems now includes Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, for master and agent installations, and Windows Server 2012 R2 and Mac OS X Mavericks for agents.
Puppet Labs also adds three new supported modules to the list already supported in the 3.2 release:
- VCS repo module, to manage repositories and pull code from version control systems such as Git.
- Windows ACL module, to manage Windows access control lists with Puppet.
- Windows PowerShell module, to use PowerShell commandlets in Windows environments.
Puppet Labs also announced the new Puppet Supported certification program, for managing compute, network and storage resources. The program launches with a number of well known partners: Cisco, Arista Networks, Brocade, Cumulus Networks, Dell, EMC, F5, Huawei and NetApp, each of them committed to creating a joint solution with Puppet Labs to manage their products with Puppet Enterprise.
Puppet Labs goal is to reduce the bottleneck caused by manual provisioning of network devices in the datacenter. Automating software defined networks (SDN), including virtual switches, routers, firewalls and other networking devices, would reduce provisioning times not only for compute resources but also the other parts of a datacenter infrastructure, and would reduce as well the turnaround times while increasing reliability and security by removing manual provisioning steps.
One of the initial partners, Cisco, has been using Puppet Labs internally for years to deploy services and manage application deployments for pruducts such as Intelligent Automation for Cloud (IAC), WebEx Hosting or Cisco IT Elastic Infrastructures (CITEIS). It has also incorporated Puppet features to enhance and support Cisco technology on the Nexus switching platform and ACI products. For instance, Nexus switches can run a Puppet agent that interacts with the underlying layer through Cisco's One Platform Kit (onePK).
With the Puppet Supported program, Puppet Labs targets the automation of the entire datacenter covering compute, networking and storage resources, and providing enterprise level support through the Puppet Enterprise product.