Puppet Labs is acquiring Cloudsmith, a provider of development tools for building out infrastructures that are automated in the manner that is becoming essential in this age of the cloud. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Luke Kanies, CEO and founder of Puppet Labs, said in an email that the Cloudsmith team has deep expertise with the Eclipse developer tools ecosystem, as well as open source, and that they have worked with the company for several years. Kanies said Cloudsmith will connect its IDE, Gepetto, to the Puppet infrastructure in order to retrieve Puppet modules from GitHub. It will then automatically install, configure and deploy the applications on Amazon EC2.
The integration of test tools with cloud environments is becoming more important for organizations that see the value in developing a programmable infrastructure. It’s necessary for a few reasons. Companies are building more apps and that means developers need better ways to test and deploy what they have created. Battalions of IT people do not solve the problem nor is it cost-effective. Instead, the trend is towards more automated infrastructures that can manage the apps and the volumes of data that companies increasingly have to handle.
But as infrastructure gets more sophisticated new entrants like SaltStack are standing out. SaltStack uses a building block metaphor to describe how its service is applicable for managing and monitoring infrastructure environments. It has been cited as an alternative to Puppet.
But at the heart of any successful data-driven organization is collaboration. Without it, the data is meaningless. Developers recognize that collaborating makes for better and faster app cycles.
Acquisitions often tell the direction a company is taking. Puppet’s acquisition of Cloudsmith shows the company is reaching deeper into the system administrator’s workflow while also balancing the need to fulfill the developer’s requirement for developing apps in a modern, collaborative way.
