Interview: Puppet, DevOps Excellence Awards finalist

Modern infrastructure needs to be fast-moving and agile, quick to respond to changing circumstances and secure.

That is Puppet's goal when building its software, allowing both productivity and peace of mind.

Puppet's work in this area helped it to reach the finalist stage at the DevOps Excellence Awards, which will be held in London this Wednesday, for two different categories: Best DevOps Cloud Product and Best Automation Project.

Cortez Frazier Jr. is the lead product manager for Relay by Puppet, with a history and passion for delivering world-class products. In true DevOps form, he says he's guided by the principle that meticulous, iterative improvement begets consistent compounding outcomes.

We caught up with him to find out what Puppet has been doing in the last 12 months.

Computing: Please provide some background on Puppet for our readers.

Cortez Frazier Jr.: Puppet is a global infrastructure automation company that empowers people and businesses with mission-critical software. We've been around for more than a dozen years and, together with our community, we spearheaded the DevOps movement, bringing to bear new organisational processes and technologies to operations. Over 40,000 organisations use Puppet, including 80 per cent of the Global 5000.

Today's infrastructure is complex and growing rapidly, resulting in a shortage of operations professionals at the same time that companies face greater security risks. With these challenges in mind, our software allows operations professionals to focus on their most critical tasks and automate everything else, while promising peace of mind.

CTG: What makes you different from other technology companies?

CFJ: Our founder's original focus was to build something people loved to use. He believed that he could create and sustain a company that thrived on its ability to solve the problems that weigh people down every day. We continue to prove that true innovation only happens when you design for people, not just for technology. DevOps represents a cultural shift that enables collaboration across people, processes, and tools. One doesn't work without the other.

Throughout all our work, Puppet employees are committed to their shared values of being open, transformational, and for each other. Our people, and the people we build for, ultimately set us apart.

CTG: What one company achievement in the last 12 months are you most proud of?

CFJ: I'm proud of the work we did with Intelligent Growth Solutions (IGS), a vertical farming company based in Scotland. They're using IoT technology, artificial intelligence and machine learning to optimise how food is grown. Their sticking point, however, was their heavy reliance on an in-house support team that was perpetually in "fix it" mode, including on nights and weekends, leading to burnout and stress for staff at the risk of losing crops.

IGS realised they could either hire and train hundreds more IT people, or find a way to automate some of their work. They looked to Relay to provide a tech solution.

Relay by Puppet works by allowing teams to quickly build fully automated cloud-native workflows that enforce policy and automate manual processes. These workflows are easy to create, repeatable, and can be learned and deployed in minutes.

By implementing Relay, IGS has been able to create automated support tools that help with a lot of their overnight auto-remediation, reducing after-hours callouts by 40 per cent - meaning fewer staff need to get out of bed to fix a problem.

Now IGS is expanding its use of Relay to address pricing issues or system elements being down or misconfigured. As they implement more workflows, they'll save even more time.

CTG: What are you working on this year?

CFJ: Right now we're working on expanding the Relay automation platform. Relay is our SaaS workflow automation tool, which can run workflows in cloud and on-prem environments. We're building out new workflows that will help organisations control costs and save money.

Later in the year, we'll be focused on our cloud compliance configuration experience. We, as a team, are really looking to invest in some of the capabilities and customer feedback we've heard so far to develop a more robust offering within cloud compliance.

CTG: Why are events like the DevOps Excellence Awards important to the IT industry?

CFJ: As the creators of the State of DevOps Report, the team at Puppet deeply understands the value of DevOps and believes in acknowledging the companies and people who are living this practice. As we see more companies moving toward a platform team model, we expect more innovation and new recognition. Recognising DevOps contributions through the DevOps Excellence Awards encourages companies to continue to invest in a collaborative culture and reward successful DevOps maturity.

The DevOps Excellence Awards will take place on the 23rd March 2022 at The Montcalm, Marble Arch. Finalists can click here to book a table.