Event-driven automation

Puppet has introduced the public beta availability of Relay, an event-driven automation platform. Relay automates processes across any cloud infrastructure, tools and APIs that developers, DevOps engineers, and SREs are managing manually today. 

The shift to the cloud has introduced immense complexity. DevOps engineers now oversee dozens of new tools and technologies, from containers and VMs to serverless applications and APIs, in addition to existing infrastructure. With the increasing number of tickets, monitoring alerts, and incident reports, engineers have reached a tipping point in productivity. Tool sprawl has created a “DevOps dumping ground” where engineers are either manually performing actions across disparate services or cobbling together homegrown solutions to help manage the influx of work. Relay relieves engineers of manual processes by listening to signals from disparate tools to automate workflows, freeing up time to focus on more valuable initiatives. 

“Without a way to manage and automate the flood of events and hundreds of APIs developers use - time, money and mental capital are being thrown away,” said Deepak Giridharagopal, CTO at Puppet. “Many engineers try to create their own one-off automation tools or integration hubs, but this is inefficient and risky. Relay replaces this home-grown digital duct tape with reusable, proven, automated workflows. It’s like IFTTT, but for DevOps.”  

Relay connects dozens of cloud platforms, tools, and APIs DevOps engineers already use, including PagerDuty, GitHub, Datadog, Jira, Terraform, Slack, and more. By listening to triggers from these services, Relay can address a wide variety of cloud automation use cases, including:

• Security: Enforce security controls across your infrastructure, such as ensuring cloud storage buckets are secured, volumes are encrypted, or that unused SSH keys are removed from the account. 
• Cost Optimization: Proactively delete underutilized cloud resources across AWS, Azure, and GCP such as unattached volumes, unused load balancers, and untagged instances that contribute to expensive monthly bills. 
• Incident Response: When new incidents arise, Relay extends PagerDuty or VictorOps by automatically remediating known issues or running diagnostic actions with Bolt.
• Continuous Delivery: Connect Relay to Docker Hub or GitHub to automatically provision cloud infrastructure with Terraform or Pulumi and deploy the latest versions of your microservices to Kubernetes, Google Cloud Run, AWS Lambda and other platforms. 
• Operations: Delete old snapshots, alert on quota usage, report on resource utilization, and more.  

“Today’s tools are focused on analyzing 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. “Relay intelligently responds to external signals by combining event-based triggers with a powerful workflow engine in a single platform.”

"Having worked in large scale data center environments and managing the complexities of modern-day hybrid cloud deployments, I have seen first hand how important it is to optimize for cost and efficiency with the rapid pace of technology adoption today,” said Stan Chan, Senior Software Engineer at Uber. “Relay delivers solutions for Enterprises to solve these problems and more. It delivers the promise of an automated future by enabling organizations to build smarter in order to solve real-world business processes in a modern, elegant, and effective way." 

With the addition of Relay, Puppet provides market-leading offerings for task-driven, model-driven, and now event-driven automation across any infrastructure (on-premises or cloud). With Puppet, you increase productivity, eliminate mistakes and accelerate delivery by integrating with some of the most important enterprise infrastructure vendors like Hashicorp, ServiceNow, Atlassian, Splunk and many more. 

“With the rise of DevOps, the portfolio of tools aimed at addressing developer and operator needs has exploded over the last decade,” said Stephen O’Grady, Principal Analyst with RedMonk. “This has led, in turn, to rampant fragmentation and highly complex, disjointed workflows. Organizations that prize velocity, therefore, are beginning to rethink their developer experience and looking for ways to automate and integrate the different touchpoints. This is the opportunity that Relay is built for.”