Puppet Labs, the leading provider of IT automation software for system administrators, today announced its acquisition of Cloudsmith, a provider of development tools for rapidly building and testing infrastructure automation. The acquisition of Cloudsmith accelerates Puppet Labs’ mission of making it easier to manage the flow of changes in complex IT environments.
According to technology research firm Gartner, automation is one of the top initiatives for enterprise IT in 2013. Cloudsmith provides tools for system administrators and developers that make it easier to automate management of IT resources through intuitive GUIs and SaaS applications. Combined with Puppet Labs’ flagship product, Puppet Enterprise, customers experience increased productivity and accelerated time to automation. Puppet Labs plans to tightly integrate Cloudsmith’s products with Puppet Enterprise to further build on these benefits.
“The Cloudsmith team is stacked with an exceptional group of technologists who are influential and heavily involved in both the Puppet and Eclipse communities,” said Luke Kanies, CEO and founder of Puppet Labs. “Like Puppet Labs, Cloudsmith cares about its products’ ease of use and has tremendous expertise in building great tools. We look forward to leveraging Cloudsmith’s experience and technology in our product suite to make automation accessible to an even larger segment of enterprise IT professionals.”
A virtual organization globally distributed across North America and Europe, Cloudsmith is the developer of Geppetto, an integrated development environment (IDE) for building and publishing Puppet modules. The company also developed Stack Hammer, a service for integrating, testing, and deploying collections of Puppet modules as complete “stacks” through integrations with GitHub and Amazon EC2. Following the acquisition, both Geppetto and Stack Hammer will continue to be developed and supported, and all Cloudsmith employees will be retained and integrated into Puppet Labs.
“We have been working with the Puppet Labs team and community for years and find we have a shared vision, culture, and passion around helping IT teams improve their lives through automation,” said Mitch Sonies, CEO and founder of Cloudsmith. “And while the Cloudsmith Geppetto community has grown to more than 10,000 users in a short period of time, together with Puppet Labs we’re looking forward to bringing Geppetto’s ease-of-automation benefits to many, many more.”
“When building or editing Puppet modules, I find Geppetto really helpful for cross-checking variable references across classes and checking parameters to classes and defines, which is something most other tools cannot handle,” said Erik Dalen, a system engineer in the Site Reliability Engineering group at Spotify. “It has allowed me to find a lot of bugs as I’m developing my Puppet modules without having to commit and run the code in question.”
