Puppet Launches Project Blueshift to Provide Bridge to Container Future

April 7, 2016 Mike Vizard hip chat, puppet, sanjay, splunk

As part of a broader expansion of its core mission Puppet today announced the launch of a Project Blueshift initiative through which it will apply its IT automation framework to Docker, Kubernetes and Mesos technologies.

Nathan Rawlins, senior vice president of marketing for what is now officially known as Puppet rather than Puppet Labs, says the company plans to make it possible to use its open source framework for managing IT operations to both provision and manage orchestration framework such as Kubernetes and Mesos.

While container orchestration is a hot topic these days the fact remains that mastering these frameworks is beyond the ken of the average IT organization. Puppet will extend its programming language in a way that will enable IT organization to manage new and existing IT investments using a common layer of abstraction, says Rawlins.

Specifically, Puppet will provide in the near future the ability to install and configure the popular Docker Engine, as well as other tools such as Compose, Swarm, Network and the Docker Universal Control Plane. An existing Puppet Module for Kubernetes will be enhanced to manage Pods, Replication Controllers, Services and more in Kubernetes, including the building of domain-specific interfaces. Puppet also revealed that it is working with Mesosphere on a module to install and configure Mesosphere DCOS.

In the meantime, Puppet has released a Puppet Enterprise 2016.1 update that make it possible to now push changes out on demand and orchestrate the order in which deployments of applications and infrastructure are made, provides more visibility into changes as they occur in real time, and enhanced a graph capability by making it possible to now map application dependencies in a way that makes it simpler to troubleshoot problems. Puppet also announced that it has integrated its IT automation framework with IT management tools from Splunk and Atlassian HipChat collaboration software for IT operations teams.

Sponsorships Available

Finally, Puppet also revealed today that it has named Sanjay Mirchandani to the new position of president and COO.

In use today at over 30,000 organizations Puppet is clearly moving to position its open source framework as being relevant for both existing IT environment and next generation microservices platforms. The challenge with microservices, of course, is that while simpler for developers to invoke they create a lot more moving parts for IT operations teams to manage. Puppet provides a way to not only manage those microservices at a higher level of abstraction, but also group them together in a way that allows the IT operations teams to manage those services more holistically.

Naturally, it may take a while still for most IT operations teams to come up to speed on microservices architecture based on containers. But one that is for sure is that amount of time it will take for that to occur will be sharply reduced using a suite of tools that many IT operations teams are to one degree or another already familiar with as part of the larger shift towards integrated DevOps management.