Continuous compliance, continuous deployment, and incident remediation

Puppet has kicked off its annual user conference, Puppetize PDX in Portland, Ore. by announcing enhancements to its current product portfolio and the public beta of a new project focused on providing a simplified continuous deployment workflow.

Puppet continues to empower its customers to effectively deliver infrastructure and software safely, securely and at scale in an automated and self-service manner across multi-cloud environments. As a leader in DevOps automation, Puppet’s latest product updates help customers enforce compliance at scale; reduce the time to remediate vulnerabilities; provides continuous deployment for cloud-native and serverless technologies. 

“With cloud native architectures on the rise and infrastructure environments becoming more distributed and heterogeneous, ensuring they can scale in a secure, auditable, and efficient manner becomes more challenging,” said Yvonne Wassenaar, CEO of Puppet. “That’s why Puppet is focused on building solutions and contributing to open source projects that focus on making it easier to automate your infrastructure and remove complexities in the way that best suits your needs; agent, agentless, declarative, and task-based. Whether you are managing Linux environments and/or Windows, environments, node centric and/or containerized applications, running a traditional data center and/or moving things to the public cloud; we are here to help; meeting you where you are and taking you to where you need to be in an increasingly multi-cloud world.”

Moving to Continuous Deployment with Cloud-Native Technologies

As more companies look to adopt cloud-native technologies, they are stymied when it comes to composing heterogeneous cloud-native tools into a single end-to-end deployment workflow to scale to multiple teams. 

Puppet’s latest project, Nebula — now available for public beta — is looking to address this problem by giving software delivery teams a consistent, easy-to-use experience for deploying cloud-native apps in a safe, secure and continuous manner.

Extensibility of Automation and Continuous Compliance with Puppet Enterprise

Puppet Enterprise 2019.2, which is generally available in early November and being previewed at Puppetize PDX, continues to focus on expanding customer use cases to solve infrastructure needs at scale and ensures continuous compliance to multiple teams to meet operational, regulatory and security requirements.

The ability to test compliance-related changes in a safe way becomes harder as companies look to expand infrastructure delivery to multiple teams. In order to solve this, Puppet created Impact Analysis which eliminates the guesswork for assessing which servers, configurations, and services will be affected by code changes before deployment. The latest iteration of Impact Analysis now supports customers with Hiera for code reusability and increased productivity.

Additional new features and capabilities from Puppet Enterprise 2019.2 include:

●      New compliance capabilities for federal agencies that must adhere to Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPs), IPv6 networks, and accessibility standards.

●      New self-service workflows to orchestrate multistep changes across environments via “plans” in the Puppet Enterprise console. 

●      Agentless enhancements including support for Cisco IOS network devices and improved inventory management from a single dashboard.

Incident Remediation to Find and Fix Vulnerabilities More Quickly

Announced at the end of August, Puppet introduced a product focused on vulnerability remediation called Puppet Remediate. The latest version is focused on helping IT teams find, prioritize and remediate mission-critical vulnerabilities faster. In the latest State of DevOps report, only 7% of firms surveyed were able to remediate vulnerabilities in less than one hour.