Puppet Inc. is bidding for a bigger share of the corporate systems management pie this week.

The company is offering improved scalability for its enterprise automation platform, an open-source, agentless product — that is, one that doesn’t require installing a software agent — that customers can use to get started with Puppet automation. It’s also introducing a new tool that enables automated discovery of hybrid infrastructure.

The announcements collectively make up “the biggest launch we’ve ever done,”said Alanna Brown, director of product marketing at Puppet. “Puppet is going from being a single-product company to one that gives you complete insight into your infrastructure so you can spread automation across the organization.”

By integrating technology it acquired with the purchase of Distelli Inc. just last month, the company said, it’s aiming to make it easier for developers to automate the deployment of code onto virtual machines and containers across physical data centers and cloud platforms. At its PuppetConf in San Francisco this week, the company will announce that it has added Distelli’s three main products to its portfolio as Puppet Pipelines for Applications, Puppet Pipelines for Containers and Puppet Container Registry. The pipelines products provide for continuous integration and delivery for applications and Kubernetes clusters, while the open-source container registry hosts Docker images to provide a unified view of container images.

Enterprise scalability

The company is also adding task management to its Puppet Enterprise 2017.3 release, providing for ad-hoc task execution with governance, scale, flexibility and workflows. Users can execute tasks across tens of thousands of nodes, define permissions with role-based access control, view audit histories of every action taken on every connected device, and orchestrate tasks from within Puppet Enterprise via an application program interfaces or a command line. Customers also have access to a library of prewritten tasks on Puppet Forge.

Other enhancements make it easier to browse and search for packages on nodes connected to Puppet Enterprise, improved versioning among sub-components and better code reusability through improved configuration data.

A new product line, Puppet Tasks, expands upon the company’s model-driven approach to automation by adding the ability to execute tasks across infrastructure and applications. The product is oriented toward tasks that don’t fit neatly into a model-driven approach, such as troubleshooting or deploying one-time changes to systems and devices, stopping and restarting services in a particular order or completing tasks sequentially.

Starter kit

The first component of Puppet Tasks is Puppet Bolt, an agentless, command-line-driven task runner for executing ad-hoc tasks across smaller infrastructures. Puppet said users can quickly get started automating basic tasks without the need to install agents by connecting to a server or device remotely via Secure Shell or Windows Remote Management.

“You can troubleshoot different systems and devices and order actions that you want to run,” Brown said. “For example, if you see that one of your Tomcat servers is out of date, you can update it automatically.” Bolt also supports scripts in any framework and on any supported platform.

Another new product, Puppet Discovery (pictured), helps companies discover resources across on-premises virtual machines and in the cloud as well as inspect running containers. This enables operations and security teams to get a full view of what container images are running as well as which might be vulnerable.

“Customers have all these diverse resources and don’t have one tool that gives them  information about all of  them,” Brown said. “So if you have several packages that are out of date, you can discover them and take action, such as an automatic update.” Puppet Discovery currently works with VMware Inc. vSphere virtual machines, Amazon Web Services Inc. and Microsoft Azure cloud VMs and containers. Puppet plans to expand the Discovery line to cover storage and network devices, as well as other cloud providers, Brown said.

Puppet offers a free version of Puppet Enterprise for up to 10 nodes. All other pricing is custom-quoted.

Image: Puppet