Puppet Labs, the leading provider of IT automation software, today announces Puppet Application Orchestration, a new way to help organizations orchestrate the deployment and management of business-critical infrastructure and applications. This simplified application orchestration process enables customers to model distributed applications and application stacks as Puppet code so they can quickly and reliably roll out new infrastructure and applications.

“Over the past several years, Puppet’s model-based approach has become the standard for modern infrastructure management. Puppet Application Orchestration is a direct extension of our existing strengths and technologies, adding new tools and capabilities that give our customers a full management stack, from bare metal all the way up to modern distributed applications,” said Luke Kanies, founder and CEO of Puppet Labs. “It marks a huge step forward for the industry, and it’s just the beginning of another decade of innovation from Puppet Labs. Because Application Orchestration is built on the core concepts underlying our past 10 years of success, and can use any of the 3,500 public Forge modules, any team using Puppet has an unfair advantage over competitors who can’t deploy as quickly.”

Why?

Great applications are critical for modern organizations to run efficiently and meet the needs of their customers, both internal and external. To thrive, IT needs to get dramatically better at rapidly deploying business-changing applications that are continually growing more complex. A single application is often a spider web of many different systems and devices, relying on a multitude of components and services. For IT teams to keep up with business and user demands and manage all this complexity, they need a much more efficient way to rapidly and repeatedly orchestrate the deployment and management of applications. And they need to be able to do it seamlessly, whether they’re deploying on premise, in the cloud, on bare metal or via containers.

“IDC’s research shows that traditional IT administration teams spend 40% of their time simply managing new service requests, provisioning systems and applying patches. In today’s fast moving DevOps and continuous delivery application environments these organizations need to increase productivity and tightly coordinate all aspects of infrastructure, middleware and application configuration and control” states Mary Johnston Turner, IDC Research VP for Enterprise System Management Software. “Application orchestration solutions that can also manage middleware and infrastructure in a consistent and unified manner will be important enablers of emerging DevOps and cloud native application environments.”

Introducing Puppet Application Orchestration

As a complete management stack on a single platform, Puppet Application Orchestration dramatically reduces the complexity of deploying and managing applications that are composed of multiple applications or services, spanning multiple nodes. It provides the ability to model applications as code, including the dependencies between different services and systems that make up an application or application stack. Major additions to the Puppet DSL let you model application relationships, including relationships with underlying infrastructure. Based on that model, a new orchestrator ensures that the right things happen in the right order on the right machines as the application is deployed, updated or destroyed. This represents a completely new way of orchestrating activities, based on modeling rather than explicitly defining a series of actions.

“Application orchestration will drive the next phase of DevOps maturity, where the business, app dev and ops all align around what delivers the most value to the business — the application and the business process,” said Nate Loomis, DevOps manager at Wells Fargo. “Being able to model, test, audit and orchestrate multi-tier applications and infrastructure all in one place across multiple work groups will be critical for large enterprise organizations as they enter the next phase of automation.”

Why Puppet?

Because Puppet Application Orchestration relies on the core Puppet platform, customers will benefit from:

  • Proven technology. Puppet’s model-driven approach is used by 30,000 companies around the world, including 65 percent of the Fortune 100.
  • Scale. Puppet is used to manage millions of nodes, including single installations that manage more than 50,000 nodes.
  • Application-model building blocks. More than 3,500 modules are freely available from the Puppet Forge to use as building blocks when defining application stacks. A number of modules are supported for Puppet Enterprise customers.

To learn more and to see Puppet Application Orchestration demoed, attend Luke’s opening PuppetConf keynote on Thursday, October 8, at 9 a.m. PT. If you can’t attend live, you can follow along on the live stream.

Availability and Pricing

Puppet Application Orchestration will be generally available later this year and will be included as part of customers’ Puppet Enterprise license. Language changes used to model applications will be available as part of Open Source Puppet, with additional open source tooling coming in subsequent updates.