Puppet (originally Puppet Labs) is a configuration management and infrastructure-as-code company founded in 2005 in Portland, Oregon, by Luke Kanies and andrew-clay-shafer. It played two distinct roles in the DevOps movement: as a tooling enabler and as a research co-publisher.
As a tooling company, Puppet's open-source configuration management tool was one of the first modern infrastructure-as-code systems, following mark-burgess's CFEngine but substantially more accessible and developer-friendly. Puppet expressed system configuration in a declarative domain-specific language — administrators defined desired system state, and Puppet converged actual systems to match. This approach made infrastructure configuration version-controllable, testable, and auditable in ways that manual administration and shell scripting did not. Chef (2009), Ansible (2012), and later tools built on the conceptual foundation that CFEngine and Puppet established; the configuration management category they created is now a standard part of the DevOps toolchain.
The open-source core with commercial extension model — Puppet Enterprise — was the standard DevOps tooling business model of the early 2010s. This made the tool broadly accessible to practitioners and startups while generating revenue from enterprise deployments.
Puppet co-published the state-of-devops-report-series with dora-research from 2013-2017, providing sponsorship and distribution reach for the research program at a critical period. The partnership gave the DORA research commercial credibility and practitioner reach, while giving Puppet thought-leadership positioning in the DevOps community. After 2017, Puppet and DORA separated; Puppet continued publishing its own State of DevOps reports while DORA continued independently before the Google acquisition.
Puppet's Portland location positioned it alongside it-revolution (also Portland) at the geographic center of what might be called the institutional DevOps ecosystem — gene-kim, Puppet Labs, and the Pacific Northwest technology community were closely networked.
The company has evolved through several iterations (Puppet Labs → Puppet, acquisitions, product pivots) as the infrastructure automation market consolidated and cloud-native tooling (Terraform, Kubernetes) shifted the competitive landscape. Its movement-founding role is primarily historical: the Puppet tool and the configuration management category it helped define were enabling conditions for the DevOps practices that followed.