Puppet Labs, Inc., which has ridden the surging popularity of the DevOps and IT automation crazes to a revenue run rate of over $75 million and IPO plans next spring, is upping its enterprise game with a new way to help organizations orchestrate the deployment and management of business-critical infrastructure and applications.

The developer of the eponymous open-source automation tool is extending its scope from individual machines to complex infrastructures with an enhancement it calls Puppet Application Orchestration. The intent is to address the growing number of applications that span multiple servers and services, giving administrators a way to manage them at a high level.

The IT world is getting more complex, said founder and CEO Luke Kanies in an interview. “Applications are getting more distributed, use more services and are spread across a wide variety of machines,” he said. “Containers and microservices only increase heterogeneity.”

Until now, Puppet has been limited to scoping out infrastructure to help administrators automate such tasks as provisioning virtual servers, databases and application servers. The enhancements elevate that perspective to the applications themselves. The enhanced application modeler can build maps that take into account multiple databases, servers and other services running on distributed platforms and show how they relate to each other. Previously, this functionality was limited to a single server.

A new feature called Orchestrator then translates these models into automation sequences that fire off when the application is launched. Significantly, Kanies said, the orchestrator can understand dependencies and adjust its processes accordingly. For example, if an application requires a database to launch, the orchestrator can figure that out and ensure that the database server launches first.

“Prior to this release, software releases had to be handled by either cobbling together a complete stack from multiple unrelated components — often tools that had very different models of operation and couldn’t share data — or you had to wait much longer for a consistent configuration to settle as a result of all machines running Puppet enough times,” Kanies said.

The new product set should also simplify change management. Instead of users having to specify every possible input or starting state, they can now specify the desired end state and the orchestrator figures out how to order operations based upon the configuration.

“For the first time you can build an application model with two databases, five application servers and three web servers and see all the relationships,” Kanies said.

Puppet Labs has raised more than $85 million from blue-chip investors and has about 1,000 paying customers and its open-source software is used by more than 28,000 companies. Other packages in the application automation market include the open source Chef and Ansible. Chef is popular with developers and Ansible stresses simplicity. Kanies asserted that the latest Puppet Labs enhancements, “makes Ansible much less necessary.”

Puppet Enterprise starts at $100 per server per year.