To kick off its PuppetConf, taking place this week in Portland, Puppet Labs is announcing Puppet Enterprise 2.0. With 2.0, Puppet Enterprise adds a graphical user console, new provisioning features and introduces a reporting and tracking framework.
Puppet Enterprise is the commercial distribution of Puppet, which includes the core open source systems management platform, plus proprietary features. Puppet Enterprise was introduced in February of this year and added simplified integration and installation features, as well as the requisite support packages and maintenance.
The Enterprise 2.0 update adds a couple of features that will appeal to companies building out their cloud infastructure:
- Provisioning features for Amazon EC2 and VMware vSphere to make it easy to deploy VMs with a single command
- A GUI so that companies can adopt Puppet quickly and easily
- Compliance features, so that companies that view changes made to machines managed with Puppet
- Orchestration features to make changes across clusters with a single command
The compliance features are not quite complete yet, says Puppet Labs CEO Luke Kanies. Currently Puppet Enterprise 2.0 has the ability to show what’s been changed in machines managed by Puppet, but doesn’t include remediation features to roll back changes. Companies will be able to monitor systems to ensure policies are being followed with the current features, but will have to wait to be able to automatically roll back changes.
The major new feature for Enterprise 2.0, though, is the GUI for managing Puppet. This will make Puppet accessible to a whole new set of companies that might have been wary of adopting a tool that can only be managed via command line tools or scripts.
Enterprise 2.0 works with VMware vSphere and AWS, but what about OpenStack and other cloud stacks? Kanies says that Puppet Labs “is relying on customer demand” to determine what it supports. Right now, Kanies says the action is with Amazon and VMware. “The actual [Puppet] user base, 99.9 percent of people actually doing things are in EC2 and vSphere.” That said, Kanies says that Puppet has “a heavy OpenStack investment” and if customer demand goes that way, Puppet will be there.
Puppet Enterprise 2.0 will be available starting October 21st. Pricing begins at $1,995 for 25 nodes. Users can test-drive Puppet Enterprise 2.0 with a free version that can handle up to 10 nodes. Note that each host is a node, rather than each physical machine.
