This article is based on announcements made at Puppetize PDX in October 2019 and reporting originally published by The Register.
Puppet Bets on Cloud-Native Workflows
At its annual Portland conference, Puppetize PDX, Puppet announced Project Nebula—a cloud-native workflow and continuous deployment tool—alongside a preview of Puppet Enterprise 2019.2 and an upcoming refresh of Puppet Forge. The announcements signal a deliberate refocus on the company’s core strengths in infrastructure automation rather than an attempt to compete directly in the already crowded CI market.
What Is Project Nebula?
Project Nebula applies Puppet’s infrastructure-as-code philosophy to cloud-native application deployment and infrastructure provisioning. Where tools like GitLab handle Continuous Integration, Nebula is designed to take over the Continuous Deployment side—orchestrating workflows that move code from commit to production for cloud-native workloads.
The tool is built on top of Tekton, the Kubernetes-native CI/CD framework. Puppet’s field CTO, Nigel Kersten, described the rationale at the event:
“It’s a workflow tool I think we haven’t really seen. Tekton has been a really good sort of first step in that direction and that’s why we’re building on it with Nebula… that idea of a workflow which ties together all of these disparate elements. Particularly one that lets a small group of experts define some sort of best practice, and then have other people consume it.”
— Nigel Kersten, Field CTO, Puppet
Puppet CTO Deepak Giridharagopal expanded on the vision, describing Nebula as giving teams “a single way to conceptualise from commit to deploy the entire assembly line for a cloud native application.”
How Nebula Workflows Operate
Nebula is workflow-centric: rather than treating individual tasks as isolated scripts, it models the full deployment pipeline as a shareable, visual workflow. Giridharagopal described the approach:
“The first step in that workflow might be ‘I’m awaiting a notification from the CI system’, or the first step might be ‘I’ve received a commit, I can kick this workflow off, but hold until I receive verification from the CI system that everything is cool’.”
— Deepak Giridharagopal, CTO, Puppet
Key characteristics of Project Nebula as announced:
- Workflow-first design: Entire deployment pipelines are modelled as directed workflows with conditional logic, not just sequential scripts.
- Built on Tekton: Leverages the Kubernetes-native pipeline framework for portability and ecosystem compatibility.
- Out-of-the-box integrations: Native support for popular cloud-native tools including Terraform and Helm.
- Shareable via Puppet Forge: Workflows can be published and consumed through Puppet Forge, enabling teams to share deployment best practices across an organisation or with the community.
- Visual pipeline representation: A graphical view of the deployment workflow, reducing reliance on reading scripts to understand pipeline state.
As Giridharagopal confirmed, Nebula is capable of deploying containerised workloads including Pupperware—Puppet’s own containerised deployment of its toolchain available on GitHub.
Puppet Enterprise 2019.2: Plans, Agentless Nodes, and a Better GUI
Alongside the Nebula announcement, Puppet previewed Puppet Enterprise 2019.2, which was targeting a General Availability release of 5 November 2019. The release focuses on making the product more accessible to operators who prefer a GUI over the CLI, without reducing the underlying power available to those who do use the command line.
Plans in the GUI
One of the headline additions is first-class GUI support for Plans—Puppet’s mechanism for running multiple Tasks together as a single orchestrated operation. A Plan can include conditional logic that changes its behaviour depending on the result of individual Tasks (for example, rolling back a change if a remote system check fails). The 2019.2 update adds:
- The ability to create and share Plans from within the Puppet Enterprise GUI.
- Step-by-step progress visibility as a Plan executes.
Improved Agentless Node and Network Device Management
The release also improves support for managing agentless nodes and networking devices—targets that cannot or do not run the Puppet agent—directly from the Enterprise console. This extends Puppet’s reach into environments where installing a full agent is impractical.
Puppet Forge Gets a User Experience Overhaul
Puppet’s VP of User Experience, Alex Bilmes, teased a significant redesign of Puppet Forge—the company’s public module and content registry. The goal, as described by Giridharagopal, is to make Forge “the centre of gravity for our entire product portfolio.” The underlying content (modules, tasks, plans) would remain consistent, but a revised user experience would make it significantly easier to discover and reuse community and vendor-published content inside your own workflows.
Strategic Context: Doubling Down on Core Strengths
The batch of announcements reflects a deliberate strategic choice. Newly appointed CEO Yvonne Wassenaar stated that after evaluating where Puppet could have the greatest impact, the conclusion was clear:
“There’s still unfinished business to do in our core areas of strength and infrastructure automation.”
— Yvonne Wassenaar, CEO, Puppet
Rather than chasing market share in continuous integration—an already congested space dominated by Jenkins, GitLab, CircleCI, and GitHub Actions—Puppet is positioning itself as the authoritative CD and infrastructure automation layer that complements those CI tools. Project Nebula is the clearest expression of that bet: assume the CI problem is solved elsewhere, and own the workflow that takes verified code all the way to running infrastructure.
Key Takeaways for DevOps Teams
- Project Nebula is Puppet’s answer to cloud-native CD, built on Tekton with native Terraform and Helm support. It was in public beta at the time of announcement.
- Puppet Enterprise 2019.2 brings Plans into the GUI and improves agentless management, targeting operators who need powerful orchestration without CLI dependency.
- Puppet Forge is being repositioned as the central hub for all Puppet content, including Nebula workflows.
- Teams already using Puppet for infrastructure automation are the primary target audience for Nebula—it is designed to slot in after an existing CI system, not replace it.
- Core Puppet functionality remains available in the open-source version; the GUI improvements are specific to Puppet Enterprise.