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Puppet today launched two efforts to make its IT automation platforms accessible to a broader range of IT teams.
The Puppet Enterprise Platform integrates the company’s flagship Puppet Enterprise offering with Relay by Puppet, the company’s existing event-driven automation platform.
At the same time, Puppet announced Puppet Connect, a self-service platform for executing tasks on-premises or in the cloud without requiring any agent software to be installed, managed or updated. Based on the open source Bolt orchestration engine, Puppet Connect is a commercial platform scheduled to be available in early 2021.
Puppet CTO Deepak Giridharagopal said Puppet Enterprise Platform is unique in that it allows IT teams with varying levels of skill and expertise to employ the same platform to automate IT operations. It is the first to support task-driven orchestration, model-driven infrastructure as code and application programming interface (API) event-driven workflows in a single platform, he said, noting as such, Puppet Enterprise Platform is designed to enable organizations to better approach IT management as a team sport.
The company is also providing access to thousands of pre-built automation modules and hundreds of API integrations for Puppet Enterprise Platform that can be downloaded from the Puppet Forge repository.
Puppet Connect, meanwhile, is designed to make it easier for IT teams to build self-service portals more consistently. IT teams regularly build self-service portals to automate tasks to help reduce the number of help desk requests generated by end users. According to the “2020 State of DevOps Report” published by Puppet, 63% of respondents have at least one self-service internal platform. Puppet Connect streamlines the process of creating a self-service framework using the orchestration capabilities of Bolt, said Giridharagopal.
Interest in automating IT tasks has risen sharply as IT teams cope with more end users working from home to limit the spread of COVID-19. In some cases, the size of the IT staff has been reduced because of the economic downturn brought on by the pandemic. Regardless of motivation, IT staffs that have varying levels of skills all need to find an easier way to automate tasks. The Puppet platforms provide a more accessible layer of abstraction to enable IT teams to automate tasks spanning multiple platforms, noted Giridharagopal.
It may be a while before IT teams of all sizes automate every IT task; however, the more those tasks become automated the further down the path they move toward embracing best DevOps practices. Those organizations may not deliberately start out to embrace DevOps, but once an IT team automates its first set of tasks it’s not long before other manual tasks become automated.
Of course, there’s no shortage of IT automation frameworks to standardize on. At this point, the more important thing for many IT teams is to simply get started at a time when no one knows for sure how many years the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic will be felt.
