Puppet's event-driven Ops platform Relay enters beta, aimed at reducing alert overload

Aimed at DevOps engineers and SREs, Relay enables real-time reactions to events as they occur

Software delivery automation vendor Puppet is extending its offerings on the Ops side of the DevOps continuum with a public beta release of Relay, an event-driven automation platform designed to automate many of the common operational processes.

Puppet describes Relay as "a system for running workflows, which are ordered series of container executions, in response to events, which are messages that come in to the system from the outside world."

The idea is to gather together all the system alerts, incident reports, triggers, messages, tickets and updates from hundreds of tools and APIs into one place where they can be managed in real-time by workflows written as YAML configuration files. The platform is aimed primarily at DevOps engineers and Site Reliability Engineers (SREs).

Relay is cloud- and tool-agnostic by virtue of its integrations with dozens of cloud platforms, tools and APIs. Among these are configuration and collaboration tools PagerDuty, VictorOps, Jira, Terraform and Slack; code repositories and VCSs Docker Hub and GitHub; monitoring and service management tools from HashiCorp, ServiceNow, Atlassian, Datadog and Splunk; and serverless and container orchestration platforms Kubernetes, Google Cloud Run and AWS Lambda.

According to Puppet, typical workflows include optimising costs by locating and shutting down underutilised cloud resources; automatically merging pull requests in GitHub or Docker Hub repositories and triggering a Terraform run; automating incident response by remediating known issues or running diagnostic actions; and enforcing security controls across environments, such as ensuring AWS S3 buckets are secured, volumes are encrypted, or that unused SSH keys are removed from an account.

"Today's tools are focused on analysing and responding to historical data. In contrast, Relay enables real-time reactions to events as they occur," said Alex Bilmes, VP of growth at Puppet, in a statement.

"Relay intelligently responds to external signals by combining event-based triggers with a powerful workflow engine in a single platform."

Nigel Kersten, field CTO at Puppet, is speaking on "Modernising change management with enterprise DevOps" at our virtual event Deskflix DevOps on 30^th June.