Puppet Labs, whose software has become popular for automatically deploying data-center servers, is now doing the same for complex applications in the cloud.

Puppet Application Orchestration — being announced today in advance of next week's PuppetConf in Portland, Ore. — is a tool for managing the "supply chain" of tasks necessary for configuring and deploying an application. It's meant for complex applications, those that span multiple servers or services.

In the same way that one web page calls up pictures and ads from disparate sites, cloud applications are starting to comprise many pieces: containers and virtual machines, or load balancers and databases. You see this happening in banking, for instance, says Nathan Rawlins, Puppet's vice president of product marketing.

"In order to update an application, you're likely tracking each of these things in sequence," he says. These things comprise a sort of stack, and they often have to be handled in a particular order.

And new concepts such as immutable infrastructure and microservices aren't making things any simpler. "For most businesses, they're laying complexity on top of the things that they're doing," Rawlins says.

Puppet Application Orchestration handles deployment and maintenance of these sprawling applications — much as Puppet's original software automates those tasks for individual machines.

Puppet has some authority to do this. The Portland, Ore.-based company has become a fixture in the DevOps world. It claims 28,000 customers, including 65 percent of the Fortune 100, and says it has more than 1,000 paying customers for Puppet Enterprise, its commercial product. (Most customers use the open source version.)

The commercial deals are getting bigger. In July, Puppet reported $10 million in sales for the first time, and in August, it scored its first deal exceeding $5 million, Rawlins says.

Now at 400 employees, Puppet has raised $86 million from investors including Cisco and VMware.

Puppet Application Orchestration will be available later this year. It's not open source; it will be included in customers' Puppet Enterprise licenses.