PORTLAND, OR--(Marketwire - Apr 27, 2011) - Puppet Labs®, a leading provider of open source systems management solutions, today announced Faces, a new set of extensible tools and APIs for interacting with Puppet and its core components. Faces dramatically simplifies the process of restructuring and extending Puppet by making it easy to build new capabilities and letting a sysadmin access them from a command line interface. Faces enables anyone to directly interact with the Puppet core functions, build new behavior on top of them, or even use the simple API to control unrelated software, all sitting side-by-side with Puppet's built-in tools.
The design of Faces is aligned with Puppet's model-driven approach to managing complex computing systems. Faces exposes command-line functionality to the user, creating a ready-made connection to the rich set of structured data that Puppet has at its core. The Faces API exposes a larger set of functionality on both clients and servers, which enables users to create even more services. Faces also allow users to modify certificate authority and authentication, which makes it more appropriate for enterprise environments. One example of how Faces can be used is to create a new set of cloud capabilities, such as setting up a server on Amazon's EC2 with a command as simple as "puppet ec2 create."
"Puppet has always been a modular, flexible framework, but there was never a great way for our users to take advantage of that fact," said Luke Kanies, creator of Puppet and CEO of Puppet Labs. "With Faces, we have tried to follow the Unix approach of creating small tools chained together to create something powerful, but all backed by a simple, extensible API. This new system gets the most out of Puppet's framework, making it more flexible and more configurable."
Faces is part of the most recent Puppet 2.7.0 release, which is also available to download today under the Apache 2.0 license. Starting with Puppet 2.7.0 Puppet will use the Apache 2.0 license rather than the GPLv2 license used in Puppet 2.6.x and earlier.
Faces will be demonstrated at Puppet Camp in Amsterdam, April 28-29. This bi-annual gathering is sold out, with 185 members of the Puppet community of sysadmins, developers and partners in attendance.
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