DEVOPSdigest

Puppet announced Project Blueshift and the availability of Puppet Enterprise 2016.1.

Blueshift gives Puppet users the resources they need to adopt the next big thing in a standard, predictable way. New innovations in Puppet Enterprise 2016.1 enable organizations to orchestrate change, giving them direct control and real-time visibility as they deploy changes across infrastructure and applications.

“We’re driven by a belief that software can make people more powerful,” said Luke Kanies, founder and CEO of Puppet. “To make that a reality, we’re focused on building the standard platform for automating delivery and operation of the software that powers everything around us. Puppet gives organizations a common language to deliver and operate modern infrastructure and to adopt whatever comes next — simply, securely, and consistently.”

Project Blueshift

Blueshift represents Puppet's engagement with leading-edge technologies and their communities — technologies like Docker, Mesos and Kubernetes — and Puppet's commitment to giving organizations the tools to build and operate constantly modern software. Because Puppet is a common language for modern infrastructure management that spans the entire data center, using Puppet makes it easier for organizations to adopt new technologies, even in brownfield environments.

In collaboration with Puppet's vibrant community of more than 30,000 organizations around the world, Blueshift is addressing some of the most exciting technologies in the industry, engaging with the communities and technologies around projects like:

- Docker. Puppet can install and configure the popular Docker Engine, as well as other tools Docker Inc. provides for managing containers — Compose, Swarm and Network. Puppet also quickly gets Docker Universal Control Plane up and running across Docker hosts.

- Kubernetes. Google's container management system is growing in popularity. The Puppet module for Kubernetes makes it easy to manage Pods, Replication Controllers, Services and more in Kubernetes, and to build domain-specific interfaces to one's Kubernetes configuration.

- Mesosphere DCOS. An enterprise-scale platform that treats a data center like a single computer. The components that comprise DCOS, including Apache Mesos and Mesosphere’s Marathon, are running in production at Apple, Yelp, Verizon and other large organizations. The Puppet community has developed several modules to install Mesos and the most popular Mesos frameworks, and methods for managing Mesos with Puppet, too. Additionally, Puppet and Mesosphere are working together on a module to install and configure Mesosphere DCOS.

- Consul. Hashicorp's open source tool for discovering services on networks can be installed and managed with Puppet. Using the two together helps companies automate different services in the data center, thanks to the work of Puppet community members.

- CoreOS. The company behind this distribution of Linux, designed for large deployments on varied infrastructure, has released other popular open source projects, including Tectonic, a Kubernetes distribution; rkt, a container engine; etcd, a distributed configuration store; and Flannel, a virtual networking component. All of these work well with Puppet, thanks to modules created by the Puppet community.

Puppet Enterprise 2016.1

Puppet Enterprise 2016.1 builds on the orchestration capabilities introduced last year, giving users direct control of the changes they want to push out, plus real-time visibility into those changes, whether it’s an app running in a Kubernetes cluster or a fleet of VMs running in AWS.

Here's what customers get with the new capabilities in Puppet Enterprise 2016.1:

- Direct change orchestration. Now it's possible to push out any change on demand and orchestrate the ordered deployments of applications and infrastructure. Direct change control also makes it possible to schedule change in a specific window, and push change through tools like HipChat, Git, Jenkins or directly with Puppet Enterprise. Operators get a whole new level of control without having to adjust how they use other tools in their DevOps and CI/CD workflows.

- Real-time orchestration visibility and throttling. Now users can see the results of changes as they occur, in real time. It's also easy now to deploy a set of changes to a small section of infrastructure, then throttle up or down as needed. For example, an operator can deploy a change to 10 servers, then stop the deployment at any moment to investigate issues. If things are going well, the operator can expand deployment to thousands of servers at a time.

- Interactive visualization. Last year, Puppet introduced the industry’s first interactive node graph. This release introduces another first: an interactive dependency graph. Now teams can visualize dependencies across the resources they manage with Puppet, including all ancestors and descendants. Understanding these relationships makes it easier for teams to troubleshoot issues faster, optimize their infrastructure as code, understand the impact of change, and collaborate more effectively as they share code between them.