Puppet Labs Tools Up For OpenStack Clouds

Puppet Labs’ support for OpenStack focuses on scalability, agility and best practices, so system administrators can reuse infrastructure. Luke Kanies, company CEO and founder, says the it has seen a lot of momentum around OpenStack as more enterprises have gone into production with cloud computing infrastructures in the past six months. Puppet released its commercial version of Puppet Enterprise in February 2011, and in the last quarter he says the company has seen significant growth.

“Puppet is really focused around ease of use for the end user,” he says. Enterprise system administrators can use Puppet Enterprise on a small scale at first, and can manage up to 10 nodes for free.

Puppet Enterprise automates tasks at any stage of the IT infrastructure lifecycle, including provisioning, discovery, OS and application configuration management, build and release management, patch management, and infrastructure audit and compliance. It’s that automation that provides system administrators with value, says Kanies. “Without automation, you can’t build the cloud with the benefits you want.”

He says many enterprises are under what he calls “social pressure” to develop cloud infrastructures, rather than actual technical pressures. “The hype is overwhelming,” Kanies says, but enterprises really need business reasons if they are to embrace cloud infrastructures, whether it’s public, private or hybrid.

OpenStack is gaining momentum as enterprises and service providers look to quickly and securely deploy both private and public clouds. Just last week HP announced the launch of HP Converged Cloud, which it says is the industry’s first hybrid delivery approach, combining its HP Converged Infrastructure, HP Converged Management and Security, Converged Information and hardened OpenStack technology. “OpenStack seems to have crossed the line from the early stages to going into production,” says Kanies.

OpenStack was first announced as a joint initiative between RackSpace and NASA in July 2010; there are now more than 150 companies involved in the open source initiative for developing cloud computing resources, including Red Hat, Dell, Cisco, Intel and HP. At this week’s second annual OpenStack conference, Rackspace, a cloud service provider, is introducing a number of new products based on OpenStack. Nicira, which entered the SDN (software defined networking) market in February with its own Network Virtualization Platform, will be partnering with Rackspace to deliver ‘networking-as-a-service’ based on the OpenStack Networking project code-named Quantum.

Donna Scott, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner Research, says when considering an open-source solution such as OpenStack, enterprises need to look at who is contributing to its development. To date, OpenStack has been more heavily used by service providers than enterprises. “This is a good release from Puppet because OpenStack is gaining momentum.”

France’s eNovance, a cloud and managed services provider, uses Puppet to manage its OpenStack infrastructure and in turn support its customer base. It also contributed to the development of Puppet’s OpenStack modules. Lo�c Dachary, the company’s chief research officer, says clients expect it to be able to solve any problem and that means being able to scale quickly. “Without Puppet, we wouldn’t be able to deploy fast enough.”

OpenStack is attractive because it’s free and open source, says Dachary, but what’s appealing about Puppet Labs is the “vibrant” community built up around its development. eNovance can provide feedback that gets published upstream to Puppet, which helps to improve future releases. “It creates software that is more sustainable in the long run.”

eNovance has a dedicated staff member focused on OpenStack who collaborates regularly with Puppet Labs.

“OpenStack requires lots of development expertise,” says Gartner’s Scott, something many enterprises don’t have internally. So many of them look to trusted vendors and service providers to help them realize their cloud initiatives. OpenStack is getting momentum from the vendor world, she notes, and there are cloud configuration platforms available for both enterprises and service providers. “There are lots of startups in this area and a huge amount of competition,” she says. “The jury’s out – no one has the enterprise space wrapped up.”

With so many available choices, Scott says enterprises should make sure they do their homework and understand what they need in a cloud environment, whether it’s building a private a cloud, leverage a public cloud or a hybrid of both. “The most important thing is to define your requirements,” she says.