Every self-respecting software company nowadays has its own user conference. Puppet is no different and tried giving its community more bang for their bucks by sprinkling some light announcements on the first day of its Puppetize PDX event.

The most highlighted news seems to be the opening of the beta phase of Project Nebula. If you’re not a keen follower of the doings of Puppet, you might easily have missed it popping up on the company website earlier this year. Project Nebula feels like Puppet’s try at putting a stake in cloud-native ground by offering a continuous deployment platform with support for widely used tools such as Terraform and Helm.

According to Puppet, the project aims at presenting teams with a simple automation method composing different tools together as well as a platform for sharing workflows and best practices. Benefits mentioned in the announcement blog include built-in examples, visualisations, and clean source-controllable deployment workflows. You might have to step away from doing everything on your own infrastructure though, since there is no comment on private cloud installments for example.

Up until now, interested customers had to get in touch and sit through a somewhat lengthy interview to be deemed worthy of trying the project. Now they can just join the queue by registering through the project’s website, so that’s an open beta for you.

Before jumping on the Nebula train however it might be worth noting that the project, at least for now, seems to purely focus on the deployment pipeline and stays away from anything build related. So if you’re looking for full-blown pipeline automation, you might need another tool to cover that part of the process. Or weigh your options again, as competing products like GitLab or Jenkins X aren’t as specialised and should be useable for both stages.

Apart from that, Puppet used its conference to give a taster of Puppet Enterprise 2019.2. The new version of the infrastructure management tool is planned to see the light of day on November 5 – or Bonfire or Firework Night if you’re reading this in the UK. PE 2019.2 will finally grant access to plans through the tool’s console and an auditable way of sharing plans with other people within an organisation.

Customers will also be able to add their network devices to the node inventory in the Puppet Enterprise GUI, which is meant to help with the integration of such resources into automated processes. Added compliance capabilities promise federal and government customers an easier time to adopt DevOps practices.