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Puppet shows its hand: All your software is belong to us

In the future code is going to be managed and deployed by other code

Rip and replacing 'rip and replace' in IT

Companies have endured rip-and-replace cycles in IT for decades, but the current incarnation of change looks different, thanks to virtualization, containerization, the proliferation of endpoints, the shift toward cloud computing, and the extent to which everything can be connected. Technical change has become more complicated. That's why Puppet's message – that it can simplify IT operations through a common language, an abstraction layer – resonates.

"The reality is the rate and pace of things are changing," said Forrester analyst Robert Stroud in an interview with The Register. "We can no longer manage that manually."

Stroud echoed a point made by Mirchandani, that Puppet has opportunities beyond configuration management. "The market is fundamentally transitioning to where you need to manage more than just infrastructure," he said. "The opportunity and the challenge for Puppet is to keep pace with the new technology."

Businesses services now involve infrastructure, middleware, and applications, said Stroud. "Moving forward, to be a complete automation environment, the successful player in the space will have a role in all three," he said.

Stroud sees promise in Puppet's container support, despite his observation that only about 8% of companies are using containers for production workloads. "It gives current Puppetized work the ability to be containerized," he said.

One challenge for Puppet, Stroud suggested, will be the extent to which the company can remain relevant as applications become less static and more dynamic. Configuration becomes more complicated when applications change.

The company also faces competition, from the likes of Chef and Ansible.

In front of a slide bearing the words "Digital transformation," Nike's senior director of infrastructure engineering Mike Wittig offered an example of the benefits of automation: Through its use of Puppet, Nike was able to reduce the time required to provision its software environment from six months to a single day.

At lunch, Nike automation engineer Phillip Pham explained that the company had previously outsourced IT operations to HP and making changes requires filing a ticket and waiting. Taking ownership of its operations made Nike more agile, to employ another overused term.

In the interest of helping companies make IT changes more rapidly, Puppet introduced a variety of new capabilities in its latest release, Puppet Enterprise 2016.4. The software now supports phased deployments so specific portions of infrastructure can be targeted for updates. It allows infrastructure to be segmented based on location, environment, configuration, and events. And its reporting now distinguishes between intentional and unintentional changes, which is useful for auditing and compliance.

Puppet also released Puppet Docker Image Build, which allows the container build process to be automated, and a Jenkins Pipeline plugin for Puppet Enterprise, which lets those using Jenkins to set up continuous integration pipelines and to target software deployment through Puppet orchestration jobs. There's even a new vRealize plugin for Puppet Enterprise, to help with the creation of virtual machine templates for automated VM provisioning.

In addition, Puppet is extending the ambit of Project Blueshift. Introduced earlier this year to help customers automate the deployment and maintenance of tools like Consul, CoreOS, Docker, Kubernetes, Mesos, Mesosphere DC/OS, and rkt, Project Blueshift now encompasses any service that runs in a container.

During his time on the keynote stage, Kanies made it sound as if Puppet is looking for a larger role. "We don’t believe that Puppet is a configuration management or server configuration platform," he said. "...Puppet helps you improve your entire software management lifecycle."

Most of the world is software. And one day, Puppet will do the cleaning. ®

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