Puppet Labs Announces Support for OpenStack

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwire - Apr 17, 2012) - Puppet Labs, the leading provider of IT automation software for system administrators, and its community partners at today's OpenStack Summit in San Francisco unveiled one of the first OpenStack implementations suitable for enterprise-class production deployments.

Collaborating together, Puppet Labs and OpenStack community members Cisco, Red Hat, Morphlabs, and eNovance developed OpenStack configuration modules for Puppet Labs' products, Puppet open source and Puppet Enterprise, to provide enterprise-ready IT automation for OpenStack's compute, object storage, and image service capabilities. The first of these OpenStack configuration modules are immediately available for free download from Puppet Forge, Puppet Labs' online marketplace.

Puppet Labs brings to the OpenStack project a unique approach to IT automation that uses a declarative, model-based technology to enable system administrators to define reusable configurations of services and applications. By automating the management of their infrastructure with Puppet and Puppet Enterprise, a typical IT organization will see a 10x boost in productivity, a 75 percent reduction in applications' time-to-production, and a significant reduction in service outages.

"OpenStack is maturing as a technology, moving off developers' desktops into production data center and cloud deployments," said Luke Kanies, CEO and founder of Puppet Labs. "However, capabilities less relevant to developers but critical to IT operations -- scalability, reliability, availability, to name but a few -- were lacking. Puppet Labs and its OpenStack community partners Cisco, Red Hat, eNovance, and Morphlabs are proud to provide one of the first OpenStack implementations ready for prime-time."

OpenStack, the open source infrastructure-as-a-service cloud project, has enjoyed unprecedented growth since its founding by Rackspace and NASA in the summer of 2009 and now boasts more than 2,600 participants across 150 organizations. Puppet Labs and its community complement this solid foundation by contributing IT automation technology hardened through years of enterprise and web-scale production deployments.

eNovance, a leading cloud services and solutions provider, is both a contributor to and user of Puppet Labs' OpenStack configuration modules. "Our customers desired the elasticity benefits of public cloud but the security of on-premise solutions," said Loïc Dachary, eNovance Chief Research Officer. "They also require robust, scalable IT automation infrastructure. Only with Puppet Labs' OpenStack configuration modules are we able to satisfy these requirements, and the vibrant community insures there'll be on-going innovation and development."

Key Capabilities

• Cloud Scalability. Puppet Labs has more than six years of large-scale production experience with enterprises and web operations, including multiple deployments of more than 50,000 servers. System administrators responsible for OpenStack applications can now take advantage of this and scale their deployments with confidence.
• Cloud Agility. Using the new support for OpenStack cloud provisioning, a system administrator in minutes can quickly provision and configure new OpenStack cloud instances in response to surges in demand.
• OpenStack Best Practices. This collaborative module work of Puppet Labs and the community encapsulates OpenStack deployment best practices so that system administrators do not have to reinvent the wheel when building production OpenStack clouds.

Supporting Quotes

"Automation is a critical component in cloud provisioning, and Puppet Lab's IT automation addresses key customer requirements by streamlining creation and configuration of production OpenStack cloud infrastructures," said Rick Clark, founder of OpenStack and Principal Engineer, Office of the Cloud CTO, Cisco. "Through a collective development effort that includes Cisco, Puppet is playing an integral role in providing the scalability and reliability required for enterprise-class production OpenStack deployments."

"Puppet Labs' experience and expertise in delivering scalable, enterprise-class IT automation products is a welcome addition to the OpenStack community," said Jim Curry, general manager of Rackspace Cloud Builders. "OpenStack is committed to providing new solutions that enhance cloud infrastructure automation and the Puppet community of system administrators and their contributions to the Puppet Forge are great new sources of innovation for OpenStack."

"Red Hat has a long history of collaboration with Puppet Labs in the open source community and we believe that OpenStack and Puppet provide a complementary technology combination," said Carl Trieloff, Senior Consulting Software Engineer at Red Hat. "Managing OpenStack clouds at scale on Red Hat Enterprise Linux requires automation. Participating in the Puppet community developing Puppet configuration modules for OpenStack provides one such automation solution for OpenStack."

"The all-SSD mCloud Rack Enterprise Edition, powered by OpenStack, Puppet, and Dell, is purpose-built for extreme productivity gains for system administrators and developers," said Winston Damarillo, CEO of Morphlabs. "Our partnership with Puppet Labs allows us to enable 'smart automation' from infrastructure to applications, maximizing DevOps for the cloud."

"Puppet is the de-facto standard and we were quickly seduced by its versatility and ease-of-use," said Loïc Dachary, eNovance Chief Research Officer. "We are now using and contributing to state-of-the-art Puppet configuration modules for OpenStack."

Additional Resources

• Learn more about Puppet Labs
• Follow Puppet Labs on Twitter @puppetlabs
• Attend Puppet Labs' session at the OpenStack SF Summit
• Learn more about Puppet Enterprise
• OpenStack project website

Pricing and Availability
All of the Puppet OpenStack configuration modules will be available for free download from Puppet Forge, Puppet Labs' online marketplace. The OpenStack cloud provisioning modules are available immediately, and others will be published to Puppet Forge over the next 60 days.

About Puppet Labs
Puppet Labs, Inc.(www.puppetlabs.com) was founded in 2005 and shipped the first release of the open source Puppet Project later the same year. Puppet's popularity has since grown to where it now is responsible for managing millions of nodes across thousands of companies and organizations, both on-premise and in the cloud, including Zynga, Citrix, Shopzilla, Match.com, Oracle/Sun, to name a few. In 2011, Puppet Labs shipped its first commercial software product, Puppet Enterprise. Now numbering seventy employees and based in Portland, Oregon, Puppet Labs is backed by investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Google Ventures, VMware, Cisco, True Ventures, Radar Partners, and Emerson Street Partners.

Puppet Labs and Puppet are trademarks of Puppet Labs Inc. All other company and product names mentioned are used only for identification purposes and may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.