Your Job isn't Easy
It's Friday afternoon and you just want to hit the weekend, but another compliance audit request just came in. Oh joy!
Responding quickly to these "fire drill" requests is getting harder. Infrastructure isn't just growing -- it's exploding. Thousands of new servers, sprawling hybrid environments, and endless new services are challenging our teams like never before. But while your infrastructure footprint grows, your time, budget, and headcount stay the same. Meanwhile, other teams keep asking for visibility they can't get themselves.
The constant demands leave little room to move forward. Automation has been the only way to stay afloat, yet most tooling requires serious ramp-up time and places additional burden squarely on the shoulders of an unlucky few.
Introducing the Infra Assistant
Perforce Puppet has been a leader in the industry for many years, providing capabilities that help teams manage that sprawling landscape of Linux and Windows nodes, but it can be daunting for sysadmins or DevOps professionals that are not working with Puppet and the Puppet-managed infrastructure on a daily basis to jump in and leverage their own expertise.
This is one of the reasons we are introducing Puppet Infra Assistant, part of the Perforce Intelligence initiative. We want everyone to be able to be part of the team and reduce learning barriers through natural language support. This will speed up the ability for the team to see what's happening inside your infrastructure environments!
Puppet Infra Assistant requires no Puppet expertise which means it frees up time from your Puppet experts and makes it possible for other members of the team to streamline repetitive tasks. A few scenarios where this might be a fit:
Sysadmins that aren't familiar with Puppet can more easily get information on drift state or details on specific systems.
Teammates can ask questions about which systems are running outdated operating system versions without having to learn Puppet Query Language (PQL).
Auditing/Compliance teams can self-service and find out which nodes require patching or are not responding.
Puppet experts can build out complex queries more quickly to extract detailed reports on current infrastructure status.
L1 support teams can identify failed Puppet runs.
Out of the box, Puppet Infra Assistant supports OpenAI and Azure OpenAI. If you happen to want to use another service, let us know and we'll help get it set up. We use a Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) model that means you aren't locked into any one provider. You can use your organization's trusted provider and control which service you bring into your infrastructure architecture.
🤖 Get started with a list of example prompts, instructions, and more on Puppet's blog:
"Getting Started with Puppet Infra Assistant: Everything You Need to Know"
We aren't done yet, though! The Puppet team have already planned for more AI-powered features in the future, including:
Actively surfacing issues to the team for action and review.
Agentic automation to proactively recommend potential fixes for state drift and suggest vulnerability resolutions.
Assistance with code generation to help fuel innovation for your teams.
What problems or tasks do you really wish that Puppet Infra Assistant could deal with for you? Let us know!
See it in action!
Product Leader Margaret Lee takes a quick tour of the Puppet Infra Assistant to show off how it works and how you get started.
The Infra Assistant in Your Architecture
The Puppet Infra Assistant operates within the boundary of your existing Puppet Enterprise services. The Infra Assistant then makes invocations to the external AI system to support Natural Language Processing (NLP). Data is then passed back to the Console Services. This diagram shows a simplified version of the architecture boundaries for the various systems.
Let's Talk About Common Questions and Concerns
While we're excited about the direction that Puppet is heading at the forefront of infrastructure automation, that doesn't mean that everybody is ready for adopting agentic tooling. There are a lot of valid concerns around cost, environmental impact, and responsible usage. The Puppet team is actively working to ensure that Infra Assistant delivers a DevOps solution with guardrails that you can trust on your workloads.
Here are a few of the common questions and considerations we've heard voiced so far to help you understand more about what's happening under the hood of this new feature.
What if our team does not want any AI running in our infrastructure?
We understand that not every team is ready—or allowed—to run third-party automations or algorithms in their infrastructure. Our architecture for Puppet Infra Assistant does connect to third-party service providers which may require you to connect to external service endpoints. Whether you're operating in an air-gapped environment, navigating delayed AI governance policies, or working under strict compliance requirements, those concerns are valid.
It should be noted that we are not using a generic AI solution. We have purpose-built the Infra Assistant for Puppet, focused on infrastructure tasks, and we designed it with safety and control in mind. It is an entirely optional feature that you can enable only when your organization is ready.
If you prefer to run Infra Assistant using an existing AI service within your own infrastructure, please reach out and we'll work with you on how to meet your needs.
Most Chat AI solutions hallucinate and are known for being confidently inaccurate. We need absolute precision!
Puppet's Infra Assistant is not just a call to a general-purpose model. It provides more reliable responses by using Puppet-engineered system context and API tools to augment external AI services. The Infra Assistant uses Puppet services and tools to get answers based on your Puppet infrastructure data. The answers are grounded in your actual environment, so there are no guesses!
We have included golden answers to specific common questions and have also implemented guardrails to ensure that Puppet Infra Assistant does not answer certain types of questions.
ℹ️ An important note: we do not use any customer data to train the Infra Assistant solution!
Perforce does ongoing testing and tuning for quality, completeness, safety, and to reduce hallucinations. This service will need to be adjusted and updated over time so we welcome any feedback that can help us with tuning to your needs!
We want to be in control of changes to our infrastructure. We do not want AI updating our critical services.
This current version of Puppet Infra Assistant doesn't make any autonomous changes to state or execute commands and has read-only access to retrieving data. Unless you ask the assistant to invoke an API, with confirmation from the user, the assistant will only retrieve data. Even then, it operates only within the constraints of your access permissions.
In the future, we may introduce additional capabilities to automate changes in your infrastructure, but these will be protected through feature flags and additional RBAC permissions. Puppet Infra Assistant will only operate with the permissions you give it. We will make sure that you know exactly what the Infra Assistant can and cannot do, and have the flexibility to align it with your own policies.
Our goal is always to keep humans in the loop!
What is the SLA on these providers?
OpenAI does not currently publish a Service-Level Agreement (SLA), but Azure OpenAI does have a published 99.9% SLA that is in line with the rest of their Azure cloud-hosted services.
Our organization doesn't use OpenAI or Azure OpenAI. How do we use our current provider?
If you want to get the benefits of the Infra Assistant but have a different AI model or service, we can work with you to add support to the Puppet Infra Assistant!
What languages can Infra Assistant understand?
As of launch, Infra Assistant can understand prompts in languages other than English, but it can respond only in English.
We don't use Puppet Enterprise Advanced (PEA). Can we still use Infra Assistant?
At this time, the Infra Assistant is only available to Puppet Enterprise Advanced customers. If you are using an open source version, Puppet Core, or Puppet Enterprise you will need to chat with the Perforce Puppet team to get converted to a version that can use the Infra Assistant.
More Questions?
One of the reasons we are posting this is to solicit more questions from the community and find out how you think the Infra Assistant could fit (or doesn't fit) within your current workflow. Send me the questions you have and I'll do my best to get them answered for you!