Last Thursday, Luke Kanies, CEO of Puppet Labs, kicked off the fantastic PuppetConf 2015. Puppet is a big deal in data center automation. More than 30,000 organizations are using Puppet with 22 new organizations starting each day. But since Gartner reports that only 15 percent of organizations are using data center automation, I’m betting a lot of you aren’t using it.
I took careful notes during the keynote kickoff and was excited about the parallels between Kanies’ vision and the Zenoss Intelligent Data Center.
He said we need to “align our organizations around customer value,” focusing the software delivery supply chain on great customer experiences. “Every place we can add an additional automated step moves us closer to this world where all software isn’t crap.” (I’m pretty sure he said crap, although it may have been craft, as in individually tailored.) And he pointed out that IT needs to undergo lots of changes. It’s built around “bits of tin” with a tremendous amount of variability in the underlying hardware and software.
From our perspective, this matches perfectly with the core of the Intelligent Data Center: Applications first. Operational agility. Common, shared infrastructure.
It’s exciting to hear that a fast-moving company like Puppet has come to the same conclusions that Zenoss has about what’s important today!
The big announcement at the conference was Puppet’s orchestration tool, which permits consistent, automated deployment of complex applications. Anyone who’s had to remember to flush a load balancer before updating a Web server knows how even simple-seeming production updates require multiple steps across multiple systems to be performed in the proper order.
With good orchestration, you’ll be able to update applications multiple times each day. The interface between development and operations is a key part of operational agility. We’ve built effective integration with infrastructure automation tools like UCS Director and Cisco ACI.
Is it time for Zenoss to work more closely with Puppet? Tweet to @Zenoss and let us know!
