Puppet acquires DevOps startup Cloudsmith

Open-source IT automation software vendor Puppet Labs has acquired Cloudsmith, which provides tools and services that can help administrators and developers more easily use the Puppet software.
Puppet bought Cloudsmith both for its technologies and its engineering expertise, said Luke Kanies, CEO and founder of Puppet Labs. All seven of Cloudsmith’s employees will continue to work for Puppet, he said.
“They built developer-like tools for an operations world, taking developer workflows to help operations people work in a mixed developer/operations world,” Kanies said.

Puppet is a well-known name in the emerging practice of DevOps, which seeks to shorten development time of software by having software developers work more closely with system administrators and other IT operations staff.

The New York-based Cloudsmith offers two products, both of which complement Puppet’s own IT automation software.

Cloudsmith’s Geppetto is a graphical user interface-based editor for building and publishing Puppet modules, one that runs as a plug-in for the Eclipse IDE (integrated developer environment).
Puppet relies on the use of modules, or bundles of code and data that provide Puppet with the instructions to automate routine operations such as software updates and new server deployments. Puppet Labs and software vendors provide some of these modules, and users also create their own.

Geppetto offers syntax highlighting, content assistance, error tracing and debugging, all based on the Puppet module DSL (domain specific language).

Puppet has offered its own plug-ins for editing Puppet modules, most notably for the Vim and Emacs editors, though those were written primarily for operations folks, Kanies said. Geppetto, a plug-in for Eclipse, “fits the core developer market very well,” he said.

Puppet will relaunch Geppetto next month at PuppetConf, the Puppet user conference to be held in San Francisco on Aug. 22 and 23.

Cloudsmith also offers Stack Hammer, a service for integrating, testing and deploying collections of software, including sets of Puppet modules, as pre-assembled stacks. Customer stacks are stored on GitHub, which users can then run on Amazon’s EC2 (Elastic Cloud Compute).
Stack Hammer eases the developer burden of deploying software for testing and production, by providing the pre-built stack of software needed to run the program.

At this time, Puppet hasn’t disclosed its plans for Stack Hammer.
“The core technology absolutely will resurface,” Kanies said. “We will provide far more services in the cloud, and Stack Hammer will be the heart of that.”

Created in 2005, Puppet Labs offers software for managing an organization’s computers and software. The software provides a declarative language that administrators can use to specify machine configurations, which then can be used to automate reoccurring deployment and maintenance routines.
In January, VMware invested $30 million in Puppet.

Terms of the Cloudsmith acquisition were not disclosed. 

Microsoft addresses DevOps with InRelease technology

Microsoft has completed its purchase of InCycle’s InRelease business unit, announced in June, and is now deploying the software to offer DevOps capabilities to its Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server users.

The company has released an InRelease preview for Visual Studio of the company’s flagship software and has discussed how the software will be folded into Microsoft’s line of development software.

“The real interest in DevOps is about figuring out how to streamline the delivery of the software from the developer’s desktop to the production environment,” said Brian Harry, Microsoft technical fellow in charge of Team Foundation Server (TFS), Microsoft’s application lifecycle management product.

The emerging practice of DevOps seeks to shorten development time of software by having software developers work more closely with system administrators and other IT operations staff. The InRelease acquisition is providing Microsoft with a set of tools it can offer its customers to facilitate DevOps workflows.

DevOps came about largely due to the increased competitive pressure on companies and service providers to update their software. “We see the need for applications to be created faster and to evolve faster,” Harry said.

As a result, the release process for new software must be shortened as well. When software was updated every six months or so, an organization could devote a few additional weeks to vetting the new version before release. But if software updates come every month, the release process must be expedited as well, Harry said.

InRelease started as a series of scripts that InCycle developed to help the company automate deployments on behalf of its customers. InCycle is a Microsoft partner focused on integration work. “When the team had a new version of their code, it was costly and difficult to move it forward into production,” said Claude Remillard, president of InCycle software.

Over time, the company bundled its scripts into a general-use release management application, one closely integrated with Visual Studio and TFS.

With InRelease, project managers can specify the workflow process for moving an application from development to testing to deployment, handling tasks such as notifying managers who need to review, or otherwise prepare for, the software. InRelease can also install the software on the appropriate servers.

“The goal is that when we deploy into an environment, all the bits are on the servers required, so I can start running my code,” Remillard said.

By the end of the year, Microsoft plans to fully integrate the InRelease authoring components into the premium, ultimate and test professional editions of Visual Studio.

The InRelease server components will be integrated into Team Foundation Server 2013, also due later this year. The InRelease deployers, which are required to run on each deployment node, will be licensed separately.

By the end of the year, Microsoft will also ship its own version of InRelease, Harry said. Until then, the product can be purchased from InCycle, and those who buy before the Microsoft product is out will get a full upgrade to the Microsoft release.

Early customers for the InRelease software included banks, retailers and commercial independent software vendors. Another big user may be Microsoft itself, which just went through a reorganization in part to more quickly adapt to the ever-changing market for devices and services.

Already, the company has promised to deliver more frequent updates to Visual Studio and Windows Server. According to Harry, the company has started to use InRelease as a way to manage accelerated release schedules of a few of its products, and it will probably use it more as time passes, much in the same way that Microsoft development teams adopted TFS.