With IT automation becoming increasingly important for organizations, Puppet Labs recently announced the availability of Puppet Enterprise 3.0. The latest version of this IT automation software comes with a software-defined approach to automating resource management for not just compute, but also networking and storage. Talking about the IT automation sphere, two names strike our mind- Puppet and Chef. Both tools equip IT admins to write scripts to automatically handle repetitive management tasks, such as applying patches, fixing security holes, and downloading updates.

By unveiling Puppet Enterprise 3.0, Puppet Labs intends to simplify the automation processes along with usage of tool itself.

“This is a major release for us, and it reflects the ways in which the cloud has continued to change the constraints on infrastructure and increase the opportunity for operations to be a differentiator. The cloud promises greater agility, shorter cycle times, more flexibility, and massive scale, but only if we continue to enhance automation’s ability to keep you at the front of the envelope. One of our core goals at the founding of Puppet Labs was to build an abstraction layer to let you manage your whole infrastructure through a single language, a single platform, with one audit trail across all of your systems. With this release, we get that much closer to this goal of a software-defined infrastructure. As the automation of your compute resources gets better, network and storage resources become the bottleneck, especially in an application-driven world,” says Luke Kanies, CEO of Puppet Labs.

Puppet Enterprise 3.0 works on a unified, software-defined approach to automating management, where enterprises can download pre-built configurations from different vendors via Puppet Labs’s Puppet Forge repository. Besides, it enables users to dynamically discover resources and orchestrate complex management operations on large volumes of cloud nodes.

The orchestration engine of Puppet Enterprise 3.0 has a fully pluggable service that can discover nodes based on Puppet classes and Facter facts. Other enhancements include a full support across major enterprise platforms, including Microsoft Windows, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, IBM AIX, Solaris, and other major Linux distributions; and reusable Puppet Forge modules.