Today Puppet Labs, creator of Puppet, announced the release of the Marionette Collective (MCollective) version 1.0. MCollective 1.0 acts as a command-line interface (CLI) to Puppet Master, the central coordination servers in a Puppet deployment and is now available for download.

“MCollective is very active with Puppet and in the Puppet Community and it just made sense to incorporate it, MCollective, into Puppet,” said Luke Kanies, Creator and CEO of Puppet, in a interview with Linux Pro Magazine. He says, “The added benefit that MCollective with Puppet brings to both the operating systems running on various platforms, public or private Clouds, as well as traditional hosted or in-house server services being offered by our partners, is that Puppet with MCollective improves IT productivity.” Kanies continues, “Sys admins will be able to manage more machines with less time.”

Kanies says that MCollective improves how Puppet works with managing applications on existing systems, and real-time discovery capabilities enhance the Puppet Dashboard. “MCollective simplifies how users schedule complex sequences of activities using data available from the Puppet platform,” he says.

Kanies says that he was motivated to create Puppet because of his past experience as a sys admin. "I found that the tools I was using to administer over 150 nodes across 30 data centers weren’t good,” he says, adding, “Now we are seeing large-scale deployments of Puppet that include one company administering 40-50,000 Puppet Nodes at one time, to other companies running anywhere from 3,500 to 10,000 Puppet nodes at a time.” According to Kanies, MCollective has only been offered from Puppet Labs since October, and in that time the largest MCollctive with Puppet deployment has been 1,500 Nodes.

For readers who want to see this new release in action, Puppet Labs offers videos to introduce MCollective, Puppet with MCollective on EC2, and more. More information on MCollective 1.0, Puppet, and Puppet Labs can be found on the website.