Puppet

Devops to grow with cloud, data services (Q&A)

Devops is a relatively new concept that centers around the interdependence of development and operations and has been on the rise in the Web 2.0 world of virtualization and the cloud. The characteristics of devops include concepts like "architect, developer, tester, product manager, project manager--all in one" and "ability to write code beyond simple scripts" all working toward an ideal of managing infrastructure in an automated fashion.

One of the players in this market is Luke Kanies, founder and CEO of the Puppet Labs, which provides support and service to users of the Puppet open-source server automation tool, and is hosting its Puppet Camp 2010 next month in San Francisco. (Disclaimer: I serve as an adviser to Puppet Labs.)

I asked Kanies some questions about devops, automation, systems management, and the cloud.

Q: Give us a brief overview of the rise of devops and why it matters? Kanies: Devops is essentially a cultural movement toward more development-like operations. First and foremost this means acknowledging and impressing the fact that your infrastructure is code, so you should be using developer tools and practice to maintain and interact with it. It also means that you should have the same requirements of your infrastructure as you do of your applications--you need an API, high quality data, version control, access control, auditing, and more.

The reason it matters is that the problems of IT have outstripped its ability to deal with them--our tools and practices largely aren't built for a world where you can turn up 36,000 machines in a week or deploy 1,000 machines an hour, nor where your boss can expect full deployment of an application across thousands of nodes in seconds or minutes rather than weeks or months. Devops attempts to fix these problems with a culture and practice that adopts and adapts development tools in the infrastructure and builds a culture of delivery and agility. … Read more

Mow down crazed puppets

Admit it: Ernie was always lovable enough, but Bert? That guy had it coming. In Puppet War:FPS, you're the janitor for a "Muppets"-style TV show. One day, for reasons unknown, the cute little critters run amok, apparently hell-bent on world domination. And because everyone else has apparently gone home for the day, it falls to you to stop them.

The game plays like a traditional first-person shooter, one that takes place in a colorful, kid-themed TV studio populated by endless hoards of hilarious-looking (but angry) puppets. You start with the janitor's weapon of choice: … Read more

Mow down crazed puppets in Puppet War:FPS

Admit it: Ernie was always lovable enough, but Bert? That guy had it coming.

In Puppet War:FPS, you're the janitor for a "Muppets"-style TV show. One day, for reasons unknown, the cute little critters run amok, apparently hell-bent on world domination. And because everyone else has apparently gone home for the day, it falls to you to stop them.

The game plays like a traditional first-person shooter, one that takes place in a colorful, kid-themed TV studio populated by endless hoards of hilarious-looking (but angry) puppets.

You start with the janitor's weapon of choice: … Read more

Adobe releasing Puppet code for managing Hadoop

Puppet Labs announced on Thursday that Adobe Systems is publishing code for managing Hadoop on the Puppet Forge community development site. (Disclosure: I am an adviser to Puppet Labs.)

Puppet is an open-source data center automation and configuration management framework aiming to provide system administrators a platform for consistent, transparent, and flexible systems management.

The necessity of data center automation and management tools (often grouped into the DevOps category) is becoming ever more apparent, as cloud principles and large-scale systems that process data in a parallel manner continue to emerge.

Case in point: Hadoop is an open-source platform powering hugely … Read more

Tab Toolkit brings guitar tabs to iPhone

Agile Partners, best known for creating an exceptionally useful $9.99 iPhone application called Guitar Toolkit that packs in a guitar tuner, a metronome, and fantastically detailed chord and scale charts, on Monday released its first follow-up app.

Tab Toolkit, also available via Apple's App Store for $9.99, enables users to read and listen to real-time synthesized versions of guitar tablature charts on their iPhone or iPod Touch.

Tab Toolkit won't have as large an audience as Guitar Toolkit, which is immediately useful to players of all levels, as it assumes that you have (or can get) … Read more

Cloud interoperability on the horizon?

Arguments for and against the cloud are starting to calm down a bit, and most people agree that the cloud is somewhere in your future, if not in your present.

Instead of arguing semantics of application development and delivery, the discussion should really be around how to deal with a mix of on-premise and on-demand, a combination that is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future.

I spent the first half of this week in Las Vegas at a nontech trade show, and missed both VMworld and the Red Hat Summit. However, watching and reading from afar, I noticed two … Read more

Reductive Labs nails $2 million in funding--Q&A

Reductive Labs, creator of the popular open-source IT automation project Puppet, has raised $2 million in Series A funding from True Ventures, the firm that also invested in (then) open-source marketing automation vendor Loopfuse.

Reductive plans to use the funding, which was announced Tuesday, to build out the functionality of Puppet, a move that won't win it any friends among competitors like Hewlett-Packard's OpsWare.

It's a good time for the company to be raising money. Counting such heavyweights as Google, Digg, Twitter, the New York Stock Exchange, Barclays Capital, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, Red Hat, Harvard Law School, … Read more

Open-source freeloaders, inventions and replacements

Over the last several months I've changed my opinions on open source any number of times. I like to think I'm not just being fickle and instead it's market dynamics that are shifting focus and opinion.

I was recently quoted in an article about open-source "leeches", and in many situations I stand behind the comments. As it turns out, one of the companies I mentioned is now paying, though many others are still not. Freeloaders will always be part of the open-source game, and I think we all accept that, even if it gets under your skin occasionally. At this point, I don't really care--I'd rather see more unpaid open source than expensive proprietary software in use.

In the past I've had bewildering conversations with CIOs and VPs where they told me that they wouldn't contribute code back because they had "created IP--why would we give it to you for free?" while generating hundreds of millions of dollars on top of open-source software that someone, somewhere had given to them for free. I guess that's the sticking point. Not the freeloading, but the assumption that what they created is somehow more valuable than the product that they built on top of.

This brings up a whole world of issues for those trying to build open source companies. Lately, I'm becoming less convinced that you can build a pure-play open source company if you don't fall into two broad categories: direct replacements or inventions. … Read more

Cisco's missing data center acquisition

Cisco has been on a software acquisition spree this past year, acquiring Jabber, PostPath, and now Tidal Software, among others. But as Cisco goes after the data center with its new Unified Computing push, one open-source company should be on Cisco's radar screen: Reductive Labs, creators of the Puppet project, a framework for automating system administration.

Tidal is a performance-monitoring solution for data centers. It's a nice start, and a definite upgrade over Cisco's baseline Unified Computing management tools. But as Forrester senior analyst Glenn O'Donnell suggests, "Cisco is the new kid in town in … Read more

Open Sources Episode 8 -- obey your Puppet master

For Episode 8 of Open Sources, we're joined by Luke Kanies, Founder and CEO of Reductive Labs, creators of the open source Puppet project.

The Puppet framework provides a means to describe IT infrastructure as policy, execute that policy to build services then audit and enforce ongoing changes to the policy. Basically Puppet makes infrastructure management dramatically easier.

You can also download the MP3 or OGG file.

In this episode:

What is Puppet and who uses it (Digg, Google, lots of others) How to explain Puppet to business-jerks like me and Matt How does Luke as an engineer think … Read more