This week I had the opportunity to attend Ubuntu Developer Summit for the Maverick Meercat release. As you may know, Puppet is a component of the Ubuntu Cloud images for both EC2 and private cloud. What makes this even more exciting is the announcement that Dell will offer Ubuntu Cloud as a preinstall option on their servers. You may read this as, effectively, as “Puppet preinstalled on Dell servers”. We’re very happy about this. The included Puppet goes beyond mere package inclusion, and includes some nice work that Canonical engineers have done to make auto-signing and setup in the cloud even smoother. In coming releases, this will become even easier to use.

At UDS we discussed many great ideas, including ways to auto-scale puppetmaster in the cloud, provide auto-magical HA and distributed puppetmasters, further improving autosigning for EC2, improving the dpkg provider, and a new launchpad project to package Puppet content for things like database servers, mail servers, web servers, and LDAP — providing easy setup of server infrastructure out of the box. If you’re interested in following this activity, there are numerous blueprints in Launchpad to follow (just search for puppet). We’re also exploring similar things ourselves to make very large scale out and HA very easy to achieve as enterprises grow from small to large in very small amounts of time — a key feature provided by public and private cloud infrastructure.

In all, it’s an exciting time for Puppet, Ubuntu, EC2, and virtualized infrastructure. It’s going to be an great year.

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