Puppet Labs Launches Enterprise OpenStack Implementation
At this week’s OpenStack Design Summit in San Francisco, IT automation specialist Puppet Labs, along with community partners Cisco Systems (NASDAQ: CSCO), Red Hat (NYSE: RHE), Morphlabs and eNovance, announced an enterprise-level implementation of OpenStack.
The joint effort has developed configuration modules for Puppet Labs’ open source and enterprise offerings to provide IT automation for OpenStack’s compute, object storage and image service capabilities. In its own words, 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.”
The OpenStack cloud provisioning modules are now available for free download on Puppet Forge, the company’s online marketplace, and the others will be on Puppet Forge within the next two months.
Many eyes, including Talkin’ Cloud’s, are on the OpenStack Design Summit this week. Just two weeks ago, in early April 2012, Citrix announced what some referred to as its “bombshell.” Making a clean break with OpenStack, which it joined at its founding in 2010, Citrix let the world know what the “next phase” of its cloud strategy was: submitting the CloudStack platform to the Apache Foundation, thus creating a potentially formidable competitor to OpenStack.
Then last week 19 technology companies pledged $4 million in annual support for the OpenStack Foundation, which our editor Joe Panettieri cautioned not to view as a knee-jerk reaction to the CloudStack development. Still, curiosity abounds this week to see what, if any, moves OpenStack and its numerous supporters will make to strengthen their competitive position.
In a conference call with Talkin’ Cloud, Puppet Labs Founder and CEO Luke Kanies commented on Puppet Labs’ enterprise chops and their confidence in their joint OpenStack deployment:
“Puppet Labs already automates the provisioning, configuration and management of Amazon EC2 public clouds, and VMware for private clouds. What we’re launching (at the Design Summit), is we’re bringing that same capability and that same enterprise-grade IT automation to OpenStack, in collaboration with Cisco, Red Hat, Morphlabs and eNovance. And with these companies we’ve built a set of reusable models that are able to build, deploy and manage the core capabilities of OpenStack. And these are built, again—collaboratively—with multiple companies, so we’re confident that this one solution is the best way to deploy and manage OpenStack.”
“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 at Cisco, in the press release. “Through a collective development effort … Puppet is playing an integral role in providing the scalability and reliability required for enterprise-class production OpenStack deployments.”
Puppet Labs released its first commercial offering, Puppet Enterprise, in 2011. It announced version 2.5 in March 2012.
