IT automation provider Puppet Labs has released Puppet Enterprise 3.2 with new capabilities to help automate infrastructure faster than ever. The new release gives system administrators the power to easily automate repetitive tasks, quickly deploy critical applications, and proactively manage infrastructure, on-premises or in the cloud.

Puppet adds first set of Puppet Enterprise supported modules, all rigorously tested and validated to ensure they perform reliably in production environments. These supported modules get operations and running faster on Puppet Enterprise without the need to write Puppet code, letting you automate management of common tasks, including Apache, MySQL, NTP, PostgreSQL and Windows registry.

Version 3.2 includes the first set of supported modules selected from over 2,000 modules from Puppet Forge, and include modules to help with time synchronization across nodes, help setting up database services, manage web servers and control windows components. Puppet says 80 to 90 percent of the work you do is the same as everyone else. The company wants to commoditize that and let you concentrate on the 20 percent of the rest.

“As organizations struggle with rapidly increasing node counts and the time pressures of meeting customer demands, reducing cycle-time is becoming more critical,“ said Luke Kanies, founder and CEO of Puppet Labs. “Puppet Enterprise 3.2 addresses these challenges by significantly reducing the time it takes our customers to deliver new value – quickly and with confidence.”

Puppet has also streamlined the deployment of enterprise agents, which saves time for enterprises with every agent. It helps expand, breakdown silos, particularly in cloud environments when provisioning is critical. The general approach of 3.2 is streamlining everything by leveraging native OS packaging systems like yum and apt.

The new technology being “Razor”

One of the important new feature of Enterprise 3.2 is a tech preview of a new technology that Puppet Labs calls “Razor.” Razor as per the company is a next-generation physical and virtual hardware provisioning solution. Razor is a tool that automatically discovers and provisions bare metal machines. Razor can help IT teams to scale infrastructure to meet increasing demand. The provisioning solution includes the ability to automatically discover bare-metal hardware, dynamically configure OS and hypervisors and hand off to Puppet Enterprise for workload configuration through policy-based automation.

“With Razor, the only manual intervention needed to turn a racked server into a fully functional machine is to power it on. The entire provisioning process completes unattended, typically in 15 minutes or less. As we all know, it’s better to spend your time getting things done, rather than getting ready to get things done,” Puppet said in a blog post.

Software-defined automated management

Puppet Enterprise 3.2 works on a unified, software-defined approach to automating management. The support for Oracle Solaris 11 extends support to more applications critical to IT joining a long list that includes Windows, AIX, RHEL, Ubuntu and more.

Puppet users can run agents in 3.2 as non-root, enabling users who don’t have root access to realize productivity gains through automation, extending the capabilities of Puppet Enterprise beyond infrastructure teams. The 3.2 version can be downloaded and used free on up to 10 nodes with no time limit.

Last year, Puppet released version 3.0 with a software-defined approach to automating resource management and extending that to networking and storage. Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud platform got a face-lift earlier this year when they announced the integration of Puppet module to allow the creation of Linux and Windows virtual machines on Windows Azure through Puppet. As a result, users of Puppet tool can now use about 1,800 settings defined by the Puppet community.