Teyo was recently on a DevOps panel at Cloud Connect 2011 in Santa Clara. This hour-long panel is chock full of interesting tidbits from some DevOps and cloud computing superstars, as well as a surprisingly useful extended metaphor about fires and fire fighting.

DevOps Panel at Cloud Connect 2011 from dev2ops.org on Vimeo.

The video comes from the fine folks at dev2ops, and features (from left to right): Andrew Shafer of Cloud Scaling, our own Teyo Tyree, Alex Honor of DTO Solutions / Rundeck Project, James Urquhart of Cisco, Juan Paul Ramirez of Shopzilla, and Lloyd Taylor from ngmoco:).

My, what a busy week! We’re pleased as punch that Puppet Labs received recognition from two different organizations:

Puppet Labs was listed in the “Cloud—Infrastructure” category of the 2011 OnDemand Top 100 Private Companies. For more information on the award, feel free to read through the press release.

A collaboration between Dyn and CloudCamp, the CloudyAwards just finished up their third annual SXSW award show. Puppet won People’s Choice for Best Configuration Tools in the Cloud.

To find out how Puppet and the cloud work so well together, feel free to peruse the solutions section of our website, the recent post on AWS CloudFormation and Puppet, and read the OStatic post about Puppet in the cloud stack of Swisstopo (the federal office of topography in Switzerland).

For an updated look at CloudFormation and Puppet, read about the integration work posted on January 6, 2012: Using CloudFormation to Build Out Fully Functional Stacks of Puppet Enterprise.

Seen all the buzz about AWS CloudFormation? We’re interested in it too. Contrary to the on-going speculation of its impact on Puppet or Chef, we see numerous ways in which CloudFormation and Puppet complement each other quite well. Zach Leslie recently pulled together a brief tutorial on bootstrapping AWS CloudFormation with Puppet. Just follow the four steps and the code samples in the tutorial.

In case you missed it also check out R.I. Pienaar’s recent blog post highlighting a demo of MCollective 1.0.1 using AWS CloudFormation. R.I. also shares his initial impressions of where AWS CloudFormation shines and where it needs some improvement.

Let us know what you think. Where are you having issues? How else can we make it even easier to use Puppet and MCollective configure and manage EC2 services?

We love highlighting members of the Puppet Community doing interesting work. swisstopo is featured in a case study on the home page of Amazon Web Services for their work migrating their GIS to the cloud using EC2. Puppet played a critical role in this transition, making it easier to configure and manage the virtual machines in the cloud.

Camptocamp set up a highly automated system to manage and provision all swisstopo FSDI servers using Puppet, a data center automation and configuration-management framework. This approach allows swisstopo to manage a virtual on-premises server infrastructure almost identical to its similar servers in the AWS cloud, which reduces vendor lock-in and obviates the management of huge numbers of binary machine images.

Let us know what projects you are working on.

We are always eager to share the experiences our customers have using Puppet to automate their infrastructure. We recently added two more case studies.

• Clickability: Puppet helps Clickability dramatically increase their speed of deployment and ensure consistency across all servers. Download the case study
• MorphLabs: MorphLabs uses Puppet for configuration management automation and to quickly deliver custom cloud services. Download the case study

From the start, we saw Puppet as a key enabler of the services we offer our customers. Puppet let us deliver an easy to manage, customized system, cheaper and more efficiently compared to other configuration management tools on the market. Using anything else would consume too much time and resources for our customers.

—Guy Naor, founder and CTO, Morphlabs

There are several more case studies in the works. If you want to share details on your use of Puppet, please let us know.

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.