Puppet zeroes in on containers, cloud workloads

Devops platform provider Puppet has introduced its Puppet Cloud Discovery service for learning what, exactly, users have running in the cloud and their impact.

As Puppet’s first foray into SaaS, the service offers visibility into cloud workloads, providing the same type of introspection as the on-premise Puppet Enterprise platform. For example, it can tell users if they might have vulnerabilities because they’re running an outdated version of OpenSSL, or it could inform users which virtual machines need to migrated when moving from Windows Server 2012 to 2016.

Cloud Discovery will debut in a preview form on the Amazon Web Services cloud later this month; plans call for it to eventually be supported on other cloud platforms as well.

Puppet is venturing into containers as well with the open source Project Lumogon, which tells users what they have running inside of Docker containers and helps them adhere to security and operational policies. It can reveal such details as which versions of OpenSSL are in use.

The Puppet Enterprise systems provisioning and application deployment platform moves to version 2017.2 today as well. The new version features a package inspection capability for package managers like NPM, Pip, and APT, and visual orchestration workflows will let users orchestrate infrastructure and application deployments from within the Enterprise web UI without having to write Puppet code. Workflows can be defined and deployments can be monitored, stopped, or started as needed.

Finally, Puppet is rolling out the open source Puppet 5 Platform, which makes it easier to download and upgrade a Puppet deployment. It features Puppet Agent, Server, and PuppetDB components. The open source version is geared toward small groups of servers, lacking enterprise such features as high availability and security capabilities, as well as support and maintenance.