Puppet Labs, the commercial sponsor of the open-source server configuration framework Puppet, announces today its acquisition of an open source project called The Marionette Collective. The Marionette Collective, also known as MCollective, is a framework to build server orchestration or parallel job execution systems.
Puppet Labs’ open-source software helps system administrators configure and automate server management, rather than relying on manually built scripts with little portability or reusability. The addition of MCollective’s real-time network discovery capabilities will improve the way in which users can schedule activities. MCollective enables server orchestration or parallel job execution systems. It enables real-time discovery of network resources and can select which resources to affect based on configuration data.
The project’s founder, R.I. Pienaar, is joining the development team at Puppet Labs.
“Puppet has always focused on the problem of configuration management, but solving that doesn’t make all of your problems go away,” says Luke Kanies, CEO of Puppet Labs. “MCollective targets the next layer of change control and orchestration in a small but powerful tool that already integrates well with Puppet.”
Kanies says that with the tools from Puppet and MCollective that users will find a solution that scales from small departments to large server farms. A recent study on the “State of Cloud Computing” indicated that many companies have yet to automate their virtual environments, an indication perhaps of much room for growth in this market.
By acquiring MCollective, Puppet Labs will be leveraging additional resources for the open source project. “We will continue to grow Puppet’s functionality and scale as our customers needs grow. This deal demonstrates our commitment to both open source and defining the next generation data center stack,” says Kanies.
