Puppet expands support for Docker, Kubernetes

Devops staple Puppet, formerly Puppet Labs, is upgrading its Puppet Enterprise IT automation platform and offering new and expanded support for infrastructure like Docker containers and Kubernetes container management.

Puppet automates the software delivery process to bridge traditional infrastructure with more contemporary technology, including public and private clouds and microservices architectures. It even has been suggested as a tool for users to build their own PaaS clouds.

Puppet Enterprise 2016.1, announced today, offers direct change orchestration, for pushing out changes on demand and orchestrating application and infrastructure deployments. Users also can schedule changes in specific windows and push them through tools like the Atlassian HipChat team chat application, Git, or the Jenkins continuous integration and delivery platform.

The new release also features real-time orchestration visibility and throttling, enabling users to see results of changes as they occur. An interactive dependency graph in the upgrade visualizes dependencies across resources being managed with Puppet.

As part of Project Blueshift, which promotes adoption of “next generation” infrastructure technologies, the company is unveiling support components for tooling that can be managed by Puppet. These modules can work with the 2016.1 release or other versions.

For Docker, Puppet will release modules for Docker’s Swarm clustering, the Compose tool for multicontainer applications and Universal Control Plane private cloud container management. Puppet previously managed Docker’s containers and engine.

Kubernetes capabilities have been updated for Puppet as well, with backing for Kubernetes Pods containers, Replication Controllers, and services. While Kubernetes is about container management, Puppet does not see any redundancy in managing infrastructure that itself was built for management. Puppet, said Tim Zonca, product marketing director, makes it straightforward to install and operate the different technologies, and it provides repeatability and scale.

In addition, Puppet is releasing modules to manage the CoreOS rkt container engine and the Apache Mesos distributed systems kernel. The company plans to soon support Mesophere Data Center Operating System, a commercialized version of Mesos. Also on tap from Puppet is support for managing the Consul service discovery tool.

Finally, Puppet is releasing a Puppet Enterprise app integrating with the Splunk operational intelligence engine, for analyzing Puppet infrastructure within Splunk. The app also can manage Splunk servers and Splunk’s Universal Forwarder tool for secure data collection.