Everybody loves Puppet! Or at the very least, an awful lot of people USE Puppet and in the IT world, “love” is often best expressed by the opening of one’s wallet. I know, in the FOSS world wallets are unnecessary, and Puppet does indeed have an Open Source version. However, once one gets to enterprise-level computing, a tool designed for enterprise scale is preferable and usually there is a cost associated.

Puppet was originally started as an open source project by Luke Kanies in 2005, essentially out of frustration with the other configuration management products available at the time. Their first commercial product was released in 2011, and today it is the most widely used configuration management tool in the world with about 30,000 companies running it. According to our own surveys, better than 60% of Linux Journal readers use some form of Puppet already and you must like it too as it regularly finishes at or near the top in Readers’ Choice awards.

The volume and complexity of infrastructure you manage is growing and getting smarter. With Puppet, YOU define the state of your IT infrastructure and Puppet automatically enforces the desired state across operating systems, physical, virtual and cloud environments, network & storage devices and applications. Puppet automates every step of the software delivery process, from provisioning of physical and virtual machines to orchestration and reporting; from early-stage code development through testing, production release and updates.

All of this has served to make SysAdmin’s lives…less complicated if not easier. Now Puppet is introducing an Application Orchestration App. Puppet Application Orchestration helps companies and their Admins orchestrate the deployment and management of business-critical infrastructure and applications. From the application layer, through the infrastructure that supports it, and across ALL your deployment tiers, you have one unified way to automate everything.

This simplified application orchestration process enables Admins to model distributed applications as Puppet code so they can quickly and reliably roll out new infrastructure and applications. Relying on the same declarative model-based approach that has made Puppet the most popular way to manage infrastructure, there are already over 3,500 modules that can be assembled to create full models of distributed applications. Puppet Application Orchestration brings together the orchestration of the activities, the execution of the activities, and ongoing monitoring & remediation of desired state in a single product, as opposed to a fractured hodge-podge of tools. Learn more about it at https://puppetlabs.com/puppet/puppet-apps/application-orchestration