Puppet Labs Releases MCollective Version 1.2.0

Newest Release of MCollective Introduces New Security and Usability Features for Enterprise Environments


PORTLAND, OR--(Marketwire - May 10, 2011) - Puppet Labs™, a leading provider of open source systems management solutions, today delivered the latest release of MCollective, its framework to build server orchestration or parallel job execution systems. MCollective 1.2.0 significantly enhances functionality in enterprise environments and introduces several new security and usability features.

One of the most powerful new features provided is the concept of sub-collectives. Sub-collectives allow users to partition their MCollective environments in order to provide network isolation, support zoned security models and allow fine-grained access control and traffic management. The concept of sub-collectives is an important enabler for introducing MCollective in higher security and enterprise environments as well as globally distributed deployments.

MCollective 1.2.0 also introduces a new plug-in that supports the new sub-collective concept by providing client authentication and enhanced message security using industry-standard AES+RSA encryption. This new plug-in provides the security needed to ensure that critical orchestration functions are strongly encrypted and protected from eavesdropping.

Users can now also develop MCollective actions, the tasks that can be orchestrated and run on their MCollective clients, using languages other than Ruby. The 1.2.0 release now supports writing actions in PHP, Perl and Python, greatly enhancing MCollective's usability for sysadmins and operators, and extending adoption potential.

Also introduced in 1.2.0 is a single executable command, bringing MCollective in line with Puppet. Now instead of the previous mc-* commands you can now run all MCollective commands using the single executable "mco."

Lastly, a number of usability and stability enhancements have been made, including a pluggable logging framework, a secure and robust wrapper for calling external scripts and improved network timeout handling. The MCollective code has been significantly refactored adding a number of new tests and support for continuous integration testing of the MCollective code base.

"The sub-collectives should go a long way in making MCollective easier and more secure for enterprises," said Luke Kanies, CEO of Puppet Labs. "We're pleased with these enhancements and we'll continue to work on improving the framework."

The 1.2.0 release is the latest production release of MCollective and supersedes the 1.1.4 and older releases. This new MCollective release is fully backwards compatible with earlier releases. It is available for download at
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