Puppet Labs announced Puppet Enterprise 3.8, with major updates to Puppet Node Manager and a new Puppet App, Puppet Code Manager.

These new capabilities represent the next step of infrastructure as code by providing robust provisioning capabilities for Docker containers, AWS infrastructure and bare metal. Additionally, with the new Puppet Code Manager, organizations can speed the deployment of infrastructure changes in a testable and programmatic way.

“Businesses are adopting DevOps tools and practices because they are under tremendous pressure to deliver new and reliable services faster, across an ever-expanding set of infrastructure technologies, “ said Nigel Kersten, CIO of Puppet Labs. “By adding support for Docker, AWS and bare metal, Puppet Enterprise 3.8 makes it faster and easier to provision and manage nearly any infrastructure technology. Now, IT teams can focus less time on managing change, and more time driving change throughout their organizations.”

Puppet Node Manager, released late last year, initially included a rules-based method to organize servers based on key characteristics, such as application, role, data center, operating environment, and geographic location. With Puppet Enterprise 3.8, Puppet Node Manager includes capabilities for automating the provisioning of infrastructure, from containers to bare metal. Puppet Node Manager makes it faster to get new systems online by automating initial provisioning, along with the key tasks required to make new infrastructure production-ready. By reducing the friction along the way, provisioning time can be reduced from days or weeks to minutes, so IT ops teams spend less time on manual and time-consuming tasks, and more time delivering innovation and value.

With support for Docker, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and bare metal environments, Puppet Labs eliminates the complexity associated with provisioning and managing infrastructure across a heterogeneous environment.

- Containers – A new Puppet Supported module for Docker makes it possible to manage the Docker Platform and launch Docker containers in Puppet-managed infrastructure. For teams that rely on containers to simplify application deployments, these new capabilities help avoid configuration issues with the Docker daemon running those containers. The result is that those teams spend less time troubleshooting configuration issues and more time developing and deploying better apps.

- Cloud environments – The new AWS module allows organizations to provision, configure, and manage AWS resources in a consistent and repeatable manner. The module supports the following AWS services: EC2, Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, Security Groups and Route53. Since these new capabilities work alongside Puppet Enterprise’s ability to manage packages, services and other host resources, organizations can describe their virtual network, launch AWS instances and then manage the software on those instances — all using Puppet Enterprise.

With a shared language and a simple interface to common AWS resources, the AWS module allows familiar practices such as code review and continuous integration to be applied to the composition of machines and networks in AWS. This gives organizations the benefits of infrastructure as code along with their mature change control process.

- Bare metal – As part of this release, Razor, Puppet Labs' bare-metal provisioning tool, moves from tech preview to a generally available, fully supported set of capabilities. Razor includes the ability to automatically discover bare-metal hardware, dynamically configure OS and/or hypervisors and hand off resources to Puppet Enterprise for workload configuration via policy-based automation. This significantly reduces the lead time for provisioning and configuring a new machine, and enables customers to get to day-two operations without manual intervention. Razor provides policy-driven bare-metal provisioning for a variety of Linux and Windows operating systems, as well as VMware's ESXi.

Puppet Code Manager, based on the popular r10k technology, is the newest Puppet App, and a step towards realizing the benefits of infrastructure as code. Puppet Enterprise users define their infrastructures in Puppet code, and then Puppet Code Manager helps manage that code as it moves through all development and testing environments to production deployment. With Puppet Code Manager, IT Ops are able to increase reliability with a consistent and automated way of changing, reviewing, testing, and promoting the Puppet code used to define their infrastructure.

Puppet Code Manager integrates easily with Git for version control, giving users all the benefits of Git: peer review using pull requests; code promotion to successive deployment tiers by merging branches; a full change history and more. Combined with other Puppet Labs technologies such as Beaker, and Jenkins for acceptance testing, Puppet Code Manager allows teams to apply continuous delivery practices to the Puppet code that defines their infrastructure.

Both Puppet Enterprise 3.8 (including the next-generation Node Manager, Razor and Puppet Code Manager) and the Puppet Supported module for Docker will be generally available in late April. The AWS module is now available on the Puppet Forge.