PuppetCamp SF is in the books. We had a great day of presentations and community at the Google campus, covering everything from cloud automation to running Puppet at scale.

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The monthly Puppet community metrics report from April is now ready to sate your curiosity about the booming Puppet community. Here is a quick summary of the April 2013 edition of the metrics for your reading pleasure, and you can also download the full April Puppet metrics report (PDF link) for your monthly dose of data.

April 2013 Metrics Summary

• 5685 members and 711 messages in Puppet-Users
• 1017 members and 145 messages in Puppet-Dev
• 992 nicks on #puppet IRC channel
• 2468 Puppet Forge accounts and 1080 modules
• 4173 Redmine accounts
• 544 forks / 1255 watchers of Puppet
• 247 Ask questions, 1168 posts, 393 members

Six Month Comparison (November 2012)

• 4988 members and 1264 messages in Puppet-Users
• 921 members and 103 messages in Puppet-Dev
• 919 nicks on #puppet IRC channel
• 1849 Puppet Forge accounts and 720 modules
• 3647 Redmine accounts
• 424 Forks / 1055 watchers of Puppet

The Ask Puppet Labs site, where you can post and answer Puppet-related questions, has continued to grow. Congrats to the top participants so far…

Can you rocket yourself into the top tier by sharing puppet knowledge in May? It’s likely! The Ask Site awaits.

Top 5 participants (by number of messages / replies posted) in the Puppet-Users list:

• jcbollinger
• Felix.Frank
• Ygor
• p….@cmcmarkets.com
• Larry Fast

Here are the top 5 participants (by number of messages / replies posted) in the Puppet-Dev list, topped this month by CEO Luke Kanies:

• Luke Kanies
• Andy Parker
• Erik Dalén
• Henrik Lindberg
• Matthaus Litteken

You can see the full report for the top 10 participants in the Puppet-Users, Puppet-Dev, Puppet-Razor and MCollective mailing lists.

Top 5 participants (by number of lines posted) in the #Puppet IRC channel:

• _rc
• zipkid
• rustx
• brendan-
• binford2k

You can see the list of the top 20 people in the full report.

The full metrics report for April (PDF link) has charts and additional details if you want to see more.

Learn More:

• View more Puppet community metrics
• Ask Puppet Labs Question and Answer site
• Watch the James Turnbull’s “State of the Community” video from PuppetConf
• Join the community in our Google Groups and more, #puppet on IRC, and #puppetize and @PuppetLabs on Twitter.
• Stay up-to-date with the Puppet Labs newsletter

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!

Last week, we had a sold-out Puppet Camp London at the lovely and historic Somerset House. A huge thank you to Quru, our partner in the region, for helping us organize the event and to Red Hat for sponsoring and doing a bunch of demos.

Luke Kanies, Puppet Labs founder and CEO, kicked off the day with the State of Puppet presentation where he talked about the current state of IT, DevOps, and how Puppet fits into the picture. It was great having Luke at Puppet Camp for the keynote and during the rest of the day. Judging by how often people were cornering him to talk about Puppet, I think everyone enjoyed having him there!

Creating great modules is one of the most important tasks for anyone using Puppet, and we had a whole presentation devoted to building reusable modules from Jon Topper at Scale Factory. He talked about what they have learned over years of building modules for their clients, and ways to make your modules more reusable and easier to work with.

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Four months ago, the Puppet Forge reached 600 modules, and our new team had started to build a bigger and better service. Today, we’re nearing our 1000th module. As one of you makes that contribution to the Puppet Forge, we want to celebrate with you through three little giveaways.

The Puppet Forge is your service for discovering Puppet modules [docs]. You’ll find modules for managing applications like Apache’s httpd web server, facts for automatically gathering warranty information, types and providers for writing better modules yourself, and so much more. Whether you’re looking for something to use as a starting point, or want to drive your entire OpenStack infrastructure with Puppet, the Forge has you covered.

To enter: Read below about our three giveaways and their rules. Then, fill out this form to make your submission.

General Rules

• A participant may only win once. If you are randomly selected to win more than one entry, you will be awarded the highest value prize, and we will re-draw the other two.
• Puppet Labs makes the final determination on whether a submission is valid.
• We will only award digital gift cards from the U.S. or U.K. Amazon stores. No other prize fulfilment will be offered.
• Puppet Labs may use details of your entry when announcing winners. Any mention will be anonymous.
• This contest ends April 5th

Favorite Module

This one’s simple. Simply tell us via our entry form about your favorite Puppet Forge module. I have a few personal favorites that I’ll tell you about once the contest ends. :-)

Rules

• Five random participants will received a $20 gift card to Amazon.com
• Entry must be a Puppet Forge module and include a brief description on why you think the module is awesome. Don’t just paste a random module link.

Contribute to an Existing Module

Having more modules is great, but let’s not forget that we’ve got nearly 1,000 existing modules to maintain and improve. Some modules may just need improved module documentation while others may be broken and need your CPR.

For this part of our celebration, we want to see you contribute to a community member’s module. Contribute something of substance to a non-Puppet Labs module between now and April 5th. Submit via our entry form, and five of you will receive a $50 gift card to Amazon.com.

Rules

• Five random participants will receive a $50 gift card to Amazon.com
• Contribution must be made to a community member’s module.
  • Your own modules do not count.
  • Puppet Labs modules do not count. This contest is about you, not us.
• Your contribution must be made between now and April 5th
• It does not need to be accepted by the author or published to Puppet Forge to be eligible.
• Puppet Labs will determine whether the contribution is eligible. Documentation updates count, but will need to substantially make the module easier to use. We will not tell you if your submission is ineligible, so be serious about your patch!

Contribution ideas

• Improve Documentation (Here’s a great example)
• Add support for your favorite operating system
• Fix a broken part of a module
• Contribute rspec-puppet tests
• Use puppet-lint to better enforce style guide compliance

Publish a New Module

Of course, we also want your new module contributions. We’ll give away three $35 gift cards to Amazon.com for new modules.

Here’s the rub: it needs to be a new module submitted between now and April 5th, and it must automate something we don’t already have. For example, don’t enter with a new Apache module but consider publishing a module for Zenoss. Before you submit your entry, do a search for your module and check the first release date. If it’s prior to March 25, your module may not be eligible.

Rules

• Three random participants will receive a $35 gift card to Amazon.com
• Module for doing X (where “X” is your submission) must not already exist on Puppet Forge as of March 25. Contribute something unique.
• Duplicate modules when both are published as of March 25 or later will be accepted. Don’t worry about losing your entry based on another’s quicker submission.
• Puppet Labs will determine whether the contribution is eligible. Submit something that actually does something and does it well. We will test each module.
• The module’s README must describe how to use the module. If we have to dig into your source code to use the module, it’s not eligible.

Learn More
Want some tips for writing better modules?

• Start with module fundamentals
• Read the doc on publishing modules to the Puppet Forge
• Check our blog for writing great modules parts one and two
• Learn about checking syntax and writing tests

We had a great response to Puppet Camp Barcelona with over 170 attendees in person and 12 more watching the internal live stream from the Telefónica offices in Madrid and Granada. A huge thank you to Telefónica for generously providing their space for us!

We kicked off the day with Chris Spence delivering the State of Puppet presentation to give attendees a good overview of Puppet and related technologies along with more information about Puppet Labs and our community. He not only kicked off the event, but he also wrapped up the day with some Puppet demos.

Gary Wilson also did two presentations, and he should win some kind of award for creative presentation style. He talked about Good Things to Know about Puppet and ZPF – The Elusive Zero Point of Failure with poetry and examples from science. He did all of this with a presentation driven by command line scripts that ran live code to build things as he described them.

One of my favorite talks of the day was about Test driven Infrastructure Development from Tomas Doran (aka bobtfish). I was a little worried during the first half of the presentation where he talked mostly about what didn’t work, but luckily, he shifted to how to make things better about halfway through the talk. If you haven’t seen him present, I highly recommend watching him for the entertainment value alone.

Alex Soto did a quick poll before he started his presentation to ask if people wanted to hear his talk about Mimicking Your Java EE Production Environment for Testing and Beyond in Spanish or English, and the overwhelming response was for him to present in Spanish. He talked about continuous delivery and releasing more often, building a pipeline, virtualization tools and how all of this (and more) works with Puppet.

Xavi Carrillo did a great talk about how Telefónica R&D uses Puppet in combination with Gitlab to configure their systems and keep everything in a controlled state to make deployments much easier. Right now, all of this work is being done in testing environments before they puppetize their production environment. Francisco Martínez from Telefónica also did a short Hiera 101 demo to demonstrate what you can do with Heira. I always like hearing presentations from people who are are still in the early stages of their work with Puppet, since a lot of people are in similar situations and can relate to these types of talks.

Like most tech events, we ended with drinks after the Puppet Camp presentations, and quite a few of us stayed for several hours. I really enjoy these social activities where we can chat about what we learned and wind down from a full day of activities.

Thank you to everyone who joined us at Puppet Camp Barcelona! If you missed it, you can get links to the presentations for this event shortly or view materials from other past Puppet Camps by visiting the Previous Puppet Camps section of the Puppet Camp page.

Learn more:

• We have Puppet Camps coming up in London, Amsterdam, San Francisco, Nuremberg, New York, Raleigh and more. Visit the Puppet Camp page to register to attend or learn more about submitting talks.
• Attend PuppetConf, our annual operations conference at the Fairmont in San Francisco on August 22 and 23. You can register now or submit a session proposal!
• Find a local Puppet User Group or start one in your city!
• Download the Learning Puppet VM, and get started learning Puppet in a safe environment following our introductory tutorial.
• Already using Puppet, and have questions? Visit our community Ask site, and get answers and advice on how to take Puppet further.
• Join the Puppet community.

Can you believe we’re almost a quarter through the year? We’ve already had quite a few Puppet Camps in 2013, but we have a few more on the schedule before we take a break for the summer and get ready for PuppetConf on August 22 – 23!

Before we take a hiatus from Puppet Camps, we’ve lined up some additional Puppet Camps for the next couple of months and we need your help! We’re looking for speakers to provide talks on Puppet technologies, as well as talks on how you use Puppet in your organization and what you’ve learned from doing so. Because most Puppet Camps bring in 100 – 200 people, the events are also a great way to test out a presentation that you are thinking of doing about Puppet at a larger conference (hint: perhaps you’re planning to submit a speaker proposal for PuppetConf later this year).

Speaker slots are still available for the following Puppet Camps:

Puppet Camp San Francisco, April 9:
Register here, and/or click here to submit a talk before March 17.

Puppet Camp Nuremberg, April 19:
Register or submit a talk before March 15. More details here.

Puppet Camp New York City, April 24:
Register here and/or click here to submit a talk before March 24:

Puppet Camp Austin, scheduled for April 29 (before DevOpsDays):
Register here and/or click here to submit a talk before April 12.

Puppet Camp Raleigh, NC (Research Triangle), May 16:
Register here and/or click here to submit a talk before April 15.

Puppet Camp tickets are still available:

We’ve got a few upcoming Puppet Camps for which presentations have been selected and agenda has been set, but we’ve still have room for additional attendees. Just make sure you secure your seats now, because they will sell out!

• Barcelona, March 14: http://puppetcampbarcelona2013.eventbrite.com
• Baltimore, March 15: http://puppetcampbaltimore2013.eventbrite.com
• Atlanta, March 19: http://puppetcampatlanta2013.eventbrite.com
• Amsterdam, April 5: http://puppetcampamsterdam2013.eventbrite.com

Puppet Camp Chicago and Puppet Camp London both rock; both events are sold out, but you can still get on the waitlist:

• Puppet Camp Chicago, March 13
• Puppet Camp London, March 27

As always, let me know if you have any questions, and I hope to see some of you at these upcoming Puppet Camps!

Learn More

• If you missed some of our recent Puppet Camps, you can catch up by reading the presentation materials (and watch videos where available) here.
• Check out recaps from last month’s Puppet Camps:
  • Puppet Camp Ghent
  • Puppet Camp LA
  • Puppet Camp Stockholm
  • Puppet Camp Oslo

Congratulations to Lee Lowder, our first Puppet Labs Featured Community Member!

As part of our ongoing efforts to highlight how fortunate Puppet Labs is to have such a vibrant community, we’re getting ready to launch a nomination-based recognition program for ‘Featured Community Members’. The first few will be selected by Puppet Labs employees until we have the nomination system and criteria polished and ready. We welcome suggestions in the comments below for how you’d like to see this program work.

When we started planning this program in March, Dawn Foster, the Community Lead at Puppet Labs, had Lee Lowder tagged as her choice as the first Featured Community Member for all of his help answering questions on IRC as well as performing moderator functions on ask.puppetlabs.com. Coincidentally, Eric Sorenson, Puppet Open Source Product Owner, had also sent an email around Puppet Labs requesting that “someone get [Lee Lowder] a t-shirt”, asserting Lee is “completely awesome”, all without knowing about Dawn’s recommendation. Eric went on to explain that sending a Puppet Labs t-shirt had alleged restorative properties. A while back, Lee was in a car crash, and said this on IRC:

[2013/02/01 18:32:02] <FriedBob> I noticed something today. Last week, when I was wearing my normal work clothes, I went to the hospital and there were some complications (albeit minor ones). Today I went back for a follow up procedure, and I wore my Puppet Labs “DevOps dependency” shirt from PuppetConf. Not only did it go smooth, it went better than expected. I’m quite confident the difference was the shirt. :)

As if trying to speed Lee’s bequeathal of Puppet Labs swag, other employees started firing off emails, confirming that yes, acknowledging Lee’s work was a top Puppet Labs priority:

“He helps me out with ‘ask.puppetlabs.com’ moderation by flagging spam content, and he’s super helpful with people on IRC, always ready to chime in. An awesome community member IMHO” replied Ken Barber from Engineering.  Ryan Coleman, Puppet Forge Product Owner, added, “He was at my pre-PuppetConf Fundamentals training and he’s awesome. He was really helpful.”

Eric also added, “Lee’s taken charge on the ask.puppetlabs.com site! He burned up the charts getting up to 600 points in the past couple of weeks, nearly double the number two spot.  He’s always ready to help out with esoteric problems on #puppet IRC and even has taken a turn helping out on the projects.puppetlabs.com bug tracker. Completely awesome!”

What more do we need say? This accountant-turned-admin has more karma than anyone else on ask.puppetlabs.com.  Eric better ride his bike faster if he’s going to catch up:

You can follow Lee at his blog under his recognizable handle FriedBob, or stay up to date with him on Twitter as @FriedBob.  Thanks, Lee, for all your contributions!

Learn More

• Participate on our new Q+A site, ask.puppetlabs.com
• Learn more about the Puppet Community

We’re excited to share our monthly Puppet community metrics report from February, packed with all kinds of fascinating tidbits about the Puppet community. Here is a quick summary of the February 2013 edition of the metrics for your reading pleasure, and can also download the full February Puppet metrics report (PDF link) for your monthly dose of data.

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On February 13th I had the pleasure of taking part in another Puppet Camp, this time in Oslo. Thanks to Redpill-Linpro for co-organizing and hosting the event!

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