Many organizations have in recent years focused on the implementation of Agile software development principles. This has mainly focused on better cooperation between the business and IT development. After the software is developed, and tested, it needs to be deployed to a production environment.

When installing the software, often many problem can emerge. Because it is impossible to mimic a production environment on the local machine, producing a pre-configured VM gives the opportunity to set up a unified development and to share with the entire development team.

Puppet Labs, the company behind the configuration management software Puppet, is a configuration management system that allows us to manage the configuration of our development machines at a central location and can continue for all machines from there. This configuration is by means of a declarative language defined in a manifest. This gives you the configuration of the machines documented in a uniform manner.

Adding another development resource to Windows Azure and taking the advantage of a popular open source DevOps tool, Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. (MS Open Tech) announced the availability of a new Windows Azure Puppet Module that allows the creation of Linux and Windows virtual machines on Windows Azure through Puppet. The VM support is offered in a module for Windows Azure published in Puppet Forge.

Moreover, the management of key services such as network configuration and databases is also supported in this module. As a result, users of Puppet tool can now use about 1,800 settings defined by the Puppet community.

MS Open Tech blog post said MS Open Tech engineers have undertaken this work through focus on enhancing interoperability across popular DevOps tools. DevOps focuses on the management of the intersection between software development and IT operations. It emphasizes collaboration and integration between the increasingly agile software development team (where rapid change is necessary), and the operations team who are required to provide maximum up time (where change may impact reliability). DevOps seeks to enable these two groups to communicate and collaborate more effectively. The contribution of a Puppet Module for Windows Azure is an important step in ensuring that users of Puppet are able to leverage their skills in a Windows Azure environment.

The Windows Azure Puppet module provides everything developers need to ensure the following services on Windows Azure including both Linux and Windows virtual machines, logically isolated sections created in Azure that can be connected securely to clients and servers and creating and maintaining SQL database.

“The ability to use Puppet to provision virtual machines on Windows Azure and thus to leverage the extensive repository of community provided modules in Puppet Forge should be compelling for many Puppet users,” said Mitch Sonies, Vice President of Business and Corporate Development of Puppet Labs, Inc. “We think this contribution is a great step toward driving adoption of Azure within the Puppet community, and we look forward to seeing community uptake and ecosystem contributions grow.”

Microsoft is heavily investing in its Azure cloud platform. Last year, the Redmond company shipped some essential enhancements to Windows Azure including Dev/Test in the Cloud, BizTalk Services, per-minute billing and no charge for stopped VMs, SSL support with Web Sites, and Active Directory integration. At the beginning of last year, Microsoft has updated the platform with support for HTML5/JS client, Cross Origin Resource Sharing (CORS), PhoneGap and Windows Phone.