Originally published on Eucalyptus.com. Republished with permission.

When I talk to IT organizations about using Eucalyptus to set up a private or hybrid cloud, they often ask “How do I get started?” Recently, we’ve published a series of Reference Architectures which are specific to common use cases deployed in the field. Let’s take a look at how the Dev/Test Reference Architecture might be used as a framework for building a private or hybrid cloud for Dev/Test purposes.

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Last week we had a great time meeting Puppet friends and fans among the more than 6,000 people who attended AWS NYC. Now we’re gearing up for next week’s AWS Summit in San Francisco, one of our favorite cities – and a veritable thunderhead of cloud technologists.

We hope we’ll see you on April 30 at the Moscone Center. You won’t want to miss AWS Senior VP Andy Jassy talking about new AWS products. Also in the lineup: Greg Johnson, head of analytics and consumer insights at Nokia Xpress Internet Services; Sean Beausoleil, lead engineer at Mailbox; and Ryan Tudhope, co-founder and VFX supervisor at Atomic Fiction (we hope he brings some film clips!).

Puppet Labs will be at Booth 110, so come talk with Brian Lake, director of inside sales; Ryan Coleman, product owner for the Puppet Forge; and Christy McCreath, product marketing manager. They’ll all be happy to answer your questions about Puppet, and dig through boxes of Puppet t-shirts to find your size.

Here are a few AWS San Francisco sessions that caught our eye:

Hybrid IT – steps to building a successful model. Brian Adler, senior services architect at RightScale, talks about what to consider when deciding how to use AWS in combination with on-premises servers. He’ll look at a few different use cases, review reference architecture for hybrid cloud and different technologies available to manage hybrid environments.

Building web scale applications with AWS with Dan Cuddeford, enterprise solutions architect, and Matt Trescot, solutions architect. Learn about architectural patterns that support highly available services that are scalable, low cost, low latency and allow for Agile development.

Continuous deployment practices with production, test and development environments running on AWS. Learn about key concepts and design patterns for continuous deployment and continuous integration from Chris Munns, solutions architect; Chris Barclay, senior product manager; and Mike Limcaco, enterprise solutions architect.

As you’re walking around the expo, drop in on a few of our friends:

Boundary in booth #414
Burnside Digital, a fellow Portland company, in #107
Citrix in booth #501
Cloudability, another Portland neighbor and friend, in booth #206
Enstratius in booth #512
Eucalyptus in booth #507
MomentumSI in booth #415
New Relic, our buddies and fellow Portlanders, in booth #413
RightScale in booth #301

Can’t make it to San Francisco this time? You can register for the keynote livestream. Watch for #awssummit tweets, and if you have any questions about Puppet, you can always get our attention by tweeting #puppetize.

Curious about how Puppet helps you provision, configure, and manage your public cloud infrastructure? Learn more!

Provisioning with Amazon Web Services
Automating and Managing EC2 services with Puppet

The OpenStack Summit has quickly become one of the biggest open source events worldwide. More than  2,400 attended this year’s event, held last week in Portland.

You could feel a lot of energy and excitement around this cloud infrastructure ecosystem during the conference – and there was also a lot of buzz around how Puppet helps automate public, private and hybrid clouds.

If you’re not familiar with OpenStack, this video will be a good introduction to why it’s called the “de facto standard cloud infrastructure platform.”  A community – and lots of innovation – have formed up around OpenStack, which is a growing, common set of APIs that connect a diverse ecosystem of different hardware vendors.

Puppet Labs was on the scene with our video camera in hand, interviewing OpenStack community members about the importance of cloud automation, configuration management, and how people are using Puppet in their OpenStack deployments.

Dan Bode of Puppet Labs talks about leading the writing of the OpenStack Puppet integration modules with other community members, including Cisco, Red Hat, Rackspace, Morphlabs and eNovance. He offers a brief overview of these modules and how they’re being used.

Boris Renski, a board member at OpenStack Foundation, talks about how Mirantis is using Puppet within their FUEL library of configuration and deployment tools that was just released at the summit. Renski points out that though cost savings are a primary driver for converting to an OpenStack infrastructure, it’s far from the only reason. Another huge driver: the ability to do continuous integration and continuous delivery on a consistent infrastructure platform so web and SaaS applications can more quickly deliver new features.

Here are a few highlights from other OpenStack Summit interviews:

• Christopher Aedo, whose company Morphlabs contributed to the OpenStack/Puppet integrations, talks about the importance of automation and configuration management on a cloud platform.
• Harsh Singh talks about Juniper Networks’ integrations with OpenStack and Puppet, and how automation is changing the networking landscape.
• Red Hat’s Perry Myers talks about Red Hat’s Distribution of OpenStack (RDO) and how it uses Puppet for configuration management.
  
• Microsoft’s Peter Pouliot talks about how he uses Puppet to develop the CI infrastructure that supports the Hyper-V integration with OpenStack.
  
• Roman Alekseenkov of Mirantis talks about how they automate their OpenStack deployments with Puppet, as well as how they configure a Highly Available cloud topology.
  
• Jim O’Neill talks about how HubSpot is moving different workloads from the public cloud to their own private, OpenStack cloud.
  
• VMware’s Scott Lowe talks about VMWare integrations with OpenStack.
  
• Red Hat’s Ryan Jarvinen talks about how OpenShift can be put on top of an OpenStack infrastructure to deploy applications.
  

If you’re just getting started with OpenStack, be sure to check out our OpenStack solutions page for more information on getting up and running with Puppet.

Join us this Thursday, April 25th at 11am PT for a live Twitter chat with Nigel Kersten, CTO at Puppet Labs and Andrea Mauro, Co-Founder of VMUG IT, to discuss The Changing Role of the IT Admin. To participate, just follow the #CloudOpsChat hashtag. We’ll answer questions about how IT admins can better position themselves in the cloud era, including:

• Is increasing automation and virtualization good or bad for your career?
• Does abstraction and better tools decrease the need for deep expertise?
• Does a cloud admin need programming skills?
• Do you think a cloud admin is a generalist with a little expertise about compute, storage, and networking?
• Or is a cloud admin an expert in cloud architectures?
• What are your thoughts on scripting vs. automation and orchestration?

To learn more, visit the VMware CloudOps blog. We look forward to hearing your thoughts!

I read an article in Datamation that answers the question “What is a private cloud?” You might not realize it, but there is still a lot of confusion in the marketplace about what private clouds are and how they relate to virtualization. This article clarifies the issue.

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OpenStack Summit lands up in Portland next week, and we’re jazzed to meet more people from the open-cloud community. If you’re coming out for the Summit, we’d love to welcome you to our fun space, have drinks and get to know you better.

So without further ado, here are our recommended activities for OpenStack folks:

Tuesday April 16, 8:30–10:00 – Puppet Labs Party
Get a warm welcome to Portland in our new office space, just a short streetcar ride from the Convention Center. We’ll be offering local beer, specialty cocktails, tasty snacks, a raffle for great prizes, and viewings of all 19 Muppet murals.

Sign up to guarantee your spot. We’ll see you at 926 NW 13th, Portland 97209. We’re on the second floor, suite 210. (You can also enter the building at 905 NW 12th.)

Monday April 15, 4:30–5:10 – Standup HA OpenStack with open Puppet manifests in under 20 minutes… for goat with Boris Renski of Mirantis
A great talk that should set you up for all you need to know to get started with Puppet and OpenStack. Pairs well with…

Wednesday April 17, 1:40–1:55 – Live demonstration at the Demo Theatre
Dan shows off the latest in Puppet and OpenStack integration.

Thursday April 18, 9:00–10:30 – Get started deploying OpenStack with Puppet with Dan Bode of Puppet Labs
Our own Dan Bode leads this workshop covering the architectural details of Puppet modules used for installation of OpenStack. He’ll show you how to get up and going quickly and easily. Don’t forget to bring your laptop with VirtualBox, Vagrant, and Git already installed.

Tuesday April 16, 1:50–2:30 – DevOps Panel
Get your DevOps on! Dan Bode moderates a panel of DevOps superstars: Mike Cohen, director of strategic alliances at Big Switch Networks; Kevin Jackson, senior solutions architect at Rackspace; James Penick, principal systems architect, Yahoo!; and Travis Tripp, systems architect at HP. Don’t miss out on this lively discussion.

Visit with the Puppeteers

Even if you can’t make our sure-to-be-raucous party, please stop by our table, pick up some swag, and quiz us on how Puppet and OpenStack work together. We’ll enjoy meeting you!

Learn more:

• Join the Puppet Labs party on Tuesday night
• Read a tutorial on getting started with Puppet and OpenStack
• Get the latest modules from StackForge
• Join the Puppet-OpenStack mailing list

Planning to attend AWS Summit in New York City on April 18? We’d love to have you drop by our booth – #512 – and chat with James Turnbull, Ben Reich and Alanna Brown. They’ll all be hanging out, and happy to gift you with a shirt or sticker.

We’re looking forward to some interesting sessions at AWS NYC, not least:

• Continuous deployment practices for companies running production, test and development environments on AWS, led by three AWS folks: Chris Munns, solutions architect; Chris Barclay, senior product manager; and Mike Limcaco, enterprise solutions architect.

• Building web scale applications with AWS using architectural patterns that support scalable, highly available services – applications that are low cost, low latency and friendly to Agile development. This session will be led by Don Cuddeford, AWS enterprise solutions architect, and Matt Trescot, solutions architect.

• What to consider when creating a hybrid IT model that includes AWS. Brian Adler, senior services architect at RightScale, will cover the concepts around cloud-enabling of your existing infrastructure, review the reference architecture for hybrid cloud, and review technological considerations by use case and technologies available to manage your hybrid IT infrastructure.

• Using Amazon CloudFront to architect your entire site for delivering both static and dynamic content. Alex Dunlap, senior manager at CloudFront, will talk about how to configure multiple origin servers, and more.

While you’re cruising around the expo space at Javits Center, make sure you visit our partners and friends:

Boundary at Booth #314
Citrix at #501
Cloudability at #412. This company is also a Portland neighbor, with offices just a short bike ride from ours.
Enstratius at #313
Eucalyptus at #312
Momentum SI at #507
RightScale at #201
 
Not able to attend AWS NYC this time? You can register for the livestream of the keynote by Amazon CTO Dr. William Vogels.

Watch for #awssummit tweets – you might pick up a few things from sessions you don’t get a chance to attend. And you can always catch our attention by including #puppetize  in your conversations ;-)

Learn more about how Puppet helps you provision, configure, and manage your public cloud infrastructure:

Provisioning with Amazon Web Services
Automating and Managing EC2 services with Puppet

As discussed by Rick Whiting, VMware recently acquired Virsto, a product for data storage optimization. That acquisition is part of VMware’s larger software defined data center strategy, where virtualization management software is used to configure data center resources for maximum efficiency and optimal performance.

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You can tell when an industry is starting to move to a higher level of maturity. It happens just about the time its original value proposition starts to feel a bit stale. If you look at the virtualization industry, you no longer hear long speeches about server consolidation and increased utilization. The bedrock is in place. Most data centers are where they need to be. The question is, how do you do start spreading the positive benefits of all the flexibility you get from virtualization? Forrester analyst Dave Bartoletti says that in 2013 virtualization must be used in advanced ways to pay off. Savings from server consolidation will no longer be the focus. Instead, virtualization management techniques must grow in sophistication to support dynamic movement of workloads, improved disaster recovery, and hybrid data centers.

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This post originally appeared on Wired.com.

For the last couple of decades, administrators have been split into a few different buckets. There are lots of specializations, but most admins are generally network, system, storage, or database admins. I’ve been seeing some signals from the market that these specializations are going away for the best admins.

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