DevOps Summit: Deploy code 30 times faster with half the failures, says Puppet Labs' Steven Thwaites

Automation the key to DevOps efficiencies and agility, claims Thwaites

Organisations adopting DevOps methodologies can deploy code up to 30 times more frequently with 50 per cent fewer failures, according to Steven Thwaites, senior technical solutions engineer at Puppet Labs - but organisations need to fully embrace automation on the "Ops" side in order to enjoy the efficiency and agility gains.

Thwaites, citing Puppet's own State of DevOps Report, was speaking at Computing's DevOps Summit in London this week. He explained the value of tool chains, "a set of tools assembled together in order to automate building and delivery of a product", and the role they have to play in DevOps, enabling IT staff to effectively fulfil multiple roles when they build services or apps for the business.

"Puppet is really about two things. Its a purpose-built language for describing a desired state of configuration," said Thwaites, and the code should be familiar to anyone who has used scripting languages. "You can describe your infrastructure quickly... and paired with that we've got software that can understand that code and implement it."

He continued: "The language is really about declaring end states. We're disinterested in how we find things and the implementation detail. We just want to talk about what we want to see 'being real' in our environment. We can describe that and it will interpret it... I don't know or care how this gets configured on one type of system or other. I just want it to happen."

You can also model it before implementation so that you can see what will happen when you run it - simulating those changes, with Puppet providing a report of the result, before you move to "enforcement mode".

The automation, furthermore, can be applied to multiple different on-premises operating systems, network devices, including storage area networking devices, various cloud platforms, and virtualisation platforms.

On top of that, there's multiple other plug-ins to the core Puppet platform, adds Thwaites. "We can surround it with lots of extra projects, many of which are open source. That means extra tooling for storage, access control, reporting and analysis," he said.

Puppet Labs, said Thwaites, already has some 25,000 customers of its automation tools, including Hiscox Insurance, New Relic and Comparethemarket.com. The latest State of DevOps Report will be released at the end of the month.

More reports from Computing's DevOps Summit 2015: