Puppet released a number of announcements today including the availability of Puppet Docker Image Build and a new version of Puppet Enterprise, which features phased deployments and situational awareness.

In April, Puppet began helping people deploy and manage things like Docker, Kubernetes, Mesosphere, and CoreOS. Now the shift is helping people manage the services that are running on top of those environments.

The Puppet Docker Image Build automates the container build process to help organizations deploy containers into production environments. This gives users a consistent way to install Docker environments using the same code they rely on to automate the delivery of software in the data center or the cloud.

“As teams are starting to rely on containers, having a dense set of Docker files is difficult to manage across teams. We enable users to describe what they want in that Docker container to make sure people have a centralized way of managing code within a container,” says Tim Zonca, VP of product marketing with Puppet.

Much of this work comes from Puppet’s Project Blueshift, which is dedicated to helping users adopt emerging technologies — Docker containers being a current focus. In the past, Project Blueshift has helped customers automate the installation and management of tools like Consul, CoreOS, Kubernetes, and Mesosphere.

Separately, Puppet announced enhancements to Puppet Enterprise 2016.4, including a deeper awareness into the changes of an organization’s infrastructure. This allows an IT team to segment its infrastructure and applications based on any facts stored in Puppet, such as location, environment, or configuration resources, and deploy changes to those targeted subjects.

“You can’t go in and make changes to your infrastructure unless you have a firm grasp of what is happening in your environment,” Zonca says. “What we allow is a rich set of data within our system, and we are making it really easy for Puppet users to access that data and use that to target deployments.”

By looking at infrastructure data, users can test a specific change to a specific part of an infrastructure or app before they roll out a large-scale deployment. This allows deployments to be more precise and targeted, Zonca says.

Additionally, Puppet and VMware partnered to develop a vRealize plug-in for Puppet Enterprise 2016.4. This provides organizations with a blueprint of their virtual machines and triggers Puppet Enterprise to configure and manage them, allowing IT teams to deliver a fully configured infrastructure. This plug-in will be generally available in November.