Puppet (company)

Products

Puppet's primary product, Puppet Enterprise, comprises a commercially supported version of its open-source configuration management tool, Puppet. Puppet IT automation software uses Puppet's declarative language to manage various stages of the IT infrastructure lifecycle, including the provisioning, patching, configuration, and management of operating system and application components across enterprise data centers and cloud infrastructures.

In February 2011 Puppet released its first commercial product, Puppet Enterprise, built on the open-source base and providing commercial users with improved usability as well as some commercial components. In September 2011, the company released Puppet Enterprise 2.0, which introduced integration with MCollective, acquired by Puppet in 2010, as well as provisioning for virtual machines directly on Amazon EC2 and VMware. In June 2013, Puppet released Puppet Enterprise 3.0, which features a rewritten orchestration engine that will ease the automated rollout of changes across multiple sites and clouds.

Puppet partners and has technology integrations with VMware, Amazon Web Services, Cisco, OpenStack, Microsoft Azure, Eucalyptus, Rightscale, and Zenoss.

Built as cross-platform software, Puppet and Puppet Enterprise operate on Linux distributions, including RHEL (and clones such as CentOS and Oracle Linux), Fedora, Debian, Mandriva, Ubuntu, and SUSE, as well as on multiple Unix systems (Solaris, BSD, Mac OS X, AIX, HP-UX), and has Microsoft Windows support. It is a model-driven solution that requires limited programming knowledge to use.

History

In 2005, Puppet was founded by current CEO Luke Kanies. The company received $2 million in Series A funding in June 2009 from True Ventures and other private investors, and then raised another $5 million in July 2010 during the Series B round, backed by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, True Ventures, and Radar Partners. In November 2011, Puppet raised an additional $8.5 million in Series C financing from new investors Cisco, Google Ventures, VMware and other existing investors. In January 2013, VMware invested $30 million in the company, bringing Puppet's total funding to $45.5 million. The funding round also brought a strategic partnership between VMware and Puppet to jointly deliver, market and sell products built for their mutual customers. In June 2014, Puppet announced another $40 million in venture backing, from existing strategic investors — specifically Cisco, Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Triangle Peak Ventures, True Ventures and VMware, nearly doubling the money that the company has raised to date.

Certification

The Puppet Certification Program is an industry certification program offered by Puppet. It uses professional exams delivered worldwide to validate and recognize system administrators and IT professionals who have the technical capabilities and real-world experience needed to manage their infrastructure proactively throughout its lifecycle. Test areas include provisioning and configuration as well as patch management and compliance using Puppet IT automation software.

The Puppet Professional Certification validates system administrator competencies in using Puppet IT automation software to manage their infrastructure effectively. The Puppet Professional Certification is earned after passing the PPT-201 System Administration Using Puppet Exam. There is a Puppet Professional Practice Exam available.

The Puppet Developer Certification validates skills and competencies for developers who wish to expand their Puppet solution by developing extensions for Puppet in Ruby. The Puppet Developer Certification is earned after passing the PPT-301 Developing for Puppet Using Ruby Exam. The PPT-301 exam has been retired as of September 30, 2014.