Puppet launches Relay

Puppet has introduced its cloud-native workflow automation platform, Relay. Relay enables CloudOps teams to build and share fully automated workflows in minutes versus days, regardless of coding or scripting experience, to ensure hybrid cloud environments are secure, compliant, and cost contained. 

CloudOps teams struggle with managing a growing number of cloud-native applications, microservices, and APIs with manual ad hoc scripts and processes. The ability to automate these different triggers into a workflow is no longer a nice-to-have — it’s a necessity. Relay connects these various point solutions and provides teams with the ability to build and share fully automated low-code workflows to exponentially improve development times and operational efficiency with increased reliability, minimized hiring of specialized roles, and reduced time to recovery. Gartner forecasts that, by 2024, 75% of large enterprises will be using at least four low-code development tools for both IT application development and citizen development initiatives.

Puppet’s general availability launch introduces two new pricing tiers in addition to its free Community tier:

• Team ($20 user/month): For small to mid-sized teams, this tier provides access of up to 30 users, 500 active workflows, Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), and Single Sign-On (SSO).
• Enterprise: For large organizations with on-prem needs, this tier provides up to 5,000 active workflows and up to 5,000 users. It also provides RBAC and SSO, as well as on-prem connectivity with Puppet Enterprise, Puppet’s flagship product. Contact sales for pricing. 

“In order to make sense of today’s highly complex IT environments and tool sprawl, cloud operations teams need a unified, self-service automation platform that both democratizes the ability to create automation and ties together the tools and APIs they’re already using,” said Deepak Giridharagopal, CTO at Puppet. “Once you've automated the lowest-level, most commoditized parts of the infrastructure stack, you still have the rest of the iceberg to wrangle. Higher-level (and higher-value) problems like compliance, incident response, and cost optimization are just too complicated and time-consuming to automate, so teams often ignore them. Relay makes these seemingly intractable tasks simple and easy. Teams can look forward to reusable, low-code workflows that anyone can create for Day 2 cloud operations in mere minutes.” 

"As enterprises adopt cloud-native architectures, there's been an interesting outcropping of new tools and technologies to solve the complexities that exist on addressing day 2 operations within these environments," said Sriram Subramanian, Research Director at IDC. "Cloud workflow automation platforms, like Relay, are one manifestation of a changing market to address these new needs. The power of the platform will lie in its ability to tie newer architectures with heritage systems and the ability to ensure that these tools have a really easy learning curve to put the ability to automate in the hands of more people."

Today, Relay connects dozens of cloud platforms, tools, and APIs already used by CloudOps teams, including AWS, DataDog, GitHub, Google Cloud Platform, Jira, Microsoft Azure, PagerDuty, Slack, Terraform and more. Relay addresses cloud automation use cases with the following capabilities:

• Recover faster: Reduce recovery time with incident response workflows from alert enrichment to auto-remediation.  
• Save money: Consolidate and simplify tool sprawl, prevent unnecessary run-away cloud spending, and clean up unused resources. With Relay’s pre-built integrations, organizations can save money on specialized hires; teams do not need to waste time learning new programming languages or boilerplate SDKs. With Relay, code reusability frees up time and saves money. 
• Ensure compliance: Ad hoc automation is all too often poorly audited and controlled. With centralized workflow audited and governed with RBAC, Relay users can eliminate costly misconfigurations in cloud environments by enforcing compliance policies. 
• Reduce toil: Replace the digital duct tape holding together complex cloud-based systems and dozens of tools with reusable, low-code workflows that anyone can create. 

“With Relay’s easy to navigate UI with a flexible and composable catalog, we were able to start building production-ready workflows in a painless and practical way,” said Stan Chan, Senior Software Engineer at Uber. “Common tasks like enforcing tagged policies on instances across cloud providers were simple to compose and deploy. Implementing security workflows that enable DevSecOps is as easy as picking items from a catalog and inputting a simple access policy. Relay truly brings together the best practices and shared domain knowledge needed to drive faster iterations and deliver real value to our business.”

"Relay helps us connect all the dots, achieving true self-healing systems on cloud-native platforms. The ease with which we can create new workflows saves us countless hours of developing custom scripts leaving more time for our engineers to help our customers grow their business," said Dries Dams, DevOps Architect at Bryxx.