Puppet Labs' portfolio has been expanded this week with a new set of extensible tools and APIs for interacting with Puppet, its open source platform for enterprise systems management.

Nattily named Faces, this new offering is aimed at giving system administrators and developers more power from a command-line interface. The intention is for Faces to directly interact with the Puppet core function set, build new behavior on top of these functions, or even use the simple API to control unrelated software — all of which should be sitting side-by-side with Puppet's built-in tools.

Puppet Labs explains that the design of Faces has been aligned with Puppet's model-driven approach to managing complex computing systems. As such, it exposes command-line functionality to the user, which (in theory) creates a ready-made connection to the set of structured data that Puppet has at its core.

The Faces API now exposes a larger set of functionality on both clients and servers, which is designed to enable users to create more services. The product will also now allow users to modify certificate authority and authentication, which may make it more appropriate for enterprise environments.

"One example of how Faces can be used is to create a new set of cloud capabilities, such as setting up a server on Amazon's EC2 with a command as simple as 'puppet ec2 create,'" said Luke Kanies, creator of Puppet and CEO of Puppet Labs.

"With Faces, we have tried to follow the UNIX approach of creating small tools chained together to create something powerful, but all backed by a simple, extensible API. This new system gets the most out of Puppet's framework, making it more flexible and more configurable."

Faces is part of the most recent Puppet 2.7.0 release, which is available to download under the Apache 2.0 license.