Puppet Inc. today announced the general availability of Relay, a low-code tool intended to reduce the amount of person hours required to maintain enterprise cloud environments.

The launch concludes a lengthy beta test that started last year. Portland-based Puppet is one of the industry’s top providers of software for managing information technology infrastructure. It competes in a crowded market where several of its rivals were acquired by bigger companies over recent years.

Enterprise cloud environments have too many components to manage by hand, which is why administrators typically write scripts to automate the most common day-to-day management tasks. Such scripts simplify operations in many respects but also introduce new complexities into the mix. The main challenge is that they’re difficult to write and maintain, to the point IT teams often have to learn new programming languages or hire specialists with relevant expertise.

Relay is Puppet’s attempt to reduce that complexity. The tool enables administrators to automate IT management tasks by visually putting together workflows in a low-code interface instead of manually writing scripts. Puppet says that by sparing administrators coding tasks such as learning the software development kit of the system they’re looking to automate, Relay can compress some projects from weeks to minutes.

A second benefit the company promises is centralization. Relay-powered automation workflows can be managed in one place, which is not always possible with traditional scripts. Having a single pane of glass is a potential time saver in large cloud deployments with hundreds of scripts automating tasks across dozens of components.  

Puppet is targeting a broad range of use cases with Relay. Disaster recovery teams can build workflows that detect when a cloud instance experiences a malfunction and fix it automatically. For cybersecurity professionals, Relay offers the ability to automatically check if infrastructure resources are configured in a way that may render them vulnerable to attack. Reducing unnecessary cloud costs and alerting IT teams to technical issues are also among the tasks that Puppet says can be streamlined with the tool.

“Once you’ve automated the lowest-level, most commoditized parts of the infrastructure stack, you still have the rest of the iceberg to wrangle,” said Puppet Chief Technology Officer Deepak Giridharagopal. “Higher-level (and higher-value) problems like compliance, incident response, and cost optimization are just too complicated and time-consuming to automate, so teams often ignore them.”

Relay continues a broader trend of IT software suppliers harnessing automation technologies to streamline administrators’ day-to-day work. ServiceNow Inc. is another company investing in this area. Last year, it teamed up with IBM Corp. to deliver artificial intelligence features that surface potential technical issues for administrators and show them troubleshooting suggestions.

Puppet’s introduction of Relay could prompt competing providers of IT infrastructure automation tools to expand their own low-code capabilities. Puppet’s rivals include IBM’s Red Hat business and Chef Software Inc., which was acquired by Progress Software Inc. in a $220 million deal last year.

Puppet is offering Relay in three flavors: a free Community version, a tier for small teams with 30 users or less and an Enterprise tier. The last edition offers an expanded feature set that includes additional capabilities for automating on-premises infrastructure and more security controls.

Image: Puppet