With 70 percent growth in the past year and offices in five different countries, it’s fair to say that Puppet, Inc. is doing well.

“We’ve been doing this so long that we know what problems we’re solving, what customers need our services and how to market those services,” said Luke Kanies, CEO of Puppet, Inc. The major two problems they solve are helping customers acquire situational awareness and control of the systems.

Kanies was interviewed by John Furrier (@furrier) and Lisa Martin (@Luccazara), hosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during OpenStack Days at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA.

Flexibility and heterogeneity are key, as no enterprise has just one platform and they all have to be integrated. “We help you manage whatever you have with common language, common tools,” said Kanies.

Every organization has different stacks that they’ve built, and while many of them would like to automate the process as much as possible, it’s impossible without that critical understanding of how their systems work. This is why awareness is so important. “We’ve been hearing from enterprises that it can take up to six weeks to get answers from their support team, but if they’ve got Puppet running it takes less than a day, with the exact same questions,” added Kanies.

Cultivating little risks

One methodology Kanies advocates is putting a little “peanut butter” over the whole platform instead of expanding all at once. This allows an organization to test out little changes over the whole system that can be tested with little risk. After doing so and having established a basic idea of what works and what doesn’t work, an organization can take bigger, more calculated risks.

It’s also important to perform tests in an environment as realistic as possible, which unfortunately is something that many tests don’t take into consideration. If a change is tested in a completely different environment from actual deployment, the site could very well crash or a team could only have 24 hours to do a massive overall, leaving a shaken system and unhappy customers.

Overall, Kanies said he’s excited about the future, as the industry is slowly learning it doesn’t have to compete all the time but can instead partner and learn from each other.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the OpenStack Days: Silicon Valley 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE