I am very pleased to announce that R.I. Pienaar, founder and lead developer of the widely used Marionette Collective (MCollective) orchestration tools, has joined Puppet Labs as a Software Architect. R.I.’s message-based orchestration tools have become some of the most widely used tools in systems management, and have literally changed the way that people handle ad-hoc command and control, orchestration, and parallel job management. Having R.I. join the Puppet Labs team is a significant milestone for us, as R.I. will help shape product efforts in MCollective, Puppet, and Puppet Enterprise.

Puppet Labs acquired MCollective from R.I. in late 2010. Since then, MCollective has become a critical piece of the Puppet infrastructure with direct integration in Puppet Enterprise for Live Management, as well as standard orchestration functionality. R.I.’s efforts in this regard have had significant impact on product for the company including Puppet Enterprise 2.0.

R.I. will continue to work on MCollective (since MCollective is now directly integrated into our products), but will also work on some of our new projects to be announced in the future. We are very glad to have R.I.’s considerable creativity and industry experience on the team helping with new products that will give sysadmins new tools and delight Puppet users.

In R.I.’s own words:

I’m really excited to finally be part of the Puppet Labs team. I’ve been part time member for over a year and it’s great to finally be a full time team member. I look forward to the opportunities this new venture brings in helping me further the DevOps eco-system.

2011 has been an amazing year, although I always find it a bit awkward living through a prime year. In the startup world, just continuing to survive another year sometimes feels like an accomplishment, but we’ve done so much more than that. Puppet Enterprise has been the spine of 2011 for us, with a first release in February and the 2.0 release in November. We’ve managed to be both broad and deep, with PE running across the majority of server platforms and also providing a few new capabilities in 2.0 that support specific activities like compliance and reducing arbitrary infrastructure variation.

In some ways, the biggest change at Puppet Labs was the shift to being design focused. Our development process has been wrapped around a tight focus on you, our users, and we’re building our plans and stories around who we’re building products for and what problems we’re helping them with. To make sure it’s not just our designers and developers who think in design, everyone at the company was given a copy of The Design of Everyday Things.

Finally, there was the investment at the end of the year, which will be the foundation for our future in many ways. Look for interesting partnership activity with VMware, Cisco, and Google Ventures in 2012, and for our product to grow and develop with their input and customer knowledge.

As interesting and challenging as 2011 was, however, 2012 looks even better. As Greg Lemond said, it never gets easier, you just go faster. We aren’t resting on our laurels—we still wake up scared every day—but there is still far more to do than is already done. Gartner says less than 20% of companies use any kind of server automation, and someone has to help those people. This is especially the case as companies try to adopt new technologies like private clouds or bring in new culture with devops—can you imagine trying to replace traditional infrastructure with self-serve, on-demand provisioning but no server automation? Inconceivable.

Data is a major area we’ll be looking to help people in 2012. Companies have huge amounts of data trapped within their infrastructure and few ways to extract value out of it, and there is a direct relationship between the efficiency and agility of a company and its usage of this data. Companies like New Relic and Nodeable are building businesses around helping people extract meaning from their operations data, and Puppet is one of their critical data sources. It produces vast amounts of data as a natural off-shoot of the work you’re using it for anyway, and we’re working to help you get more value out of that data. We’ve got one customer whose Puppet infrastructure—that’s just Puppet, not the services maintained by Puppet — is producing 750GB of data a day. One one hand, it’s expensive to do much with that volume of data without a clear business driver, but on the other hand, it makes clear how much more you could know about what’s going on in your world.

We like to think of our efforts in this area as Big Data in the Infrastructure. Big Data projects are already a popular way for companies to start using Puppet, but here we’re talking about getting more from your Puppet data, not just managing Hadoop. Puppet already knows what you’re managing, what it’s related to, and how it’s changing, because it needs that to do its job. We’re working on giving you a clearer picture of all of this data, and some great levers and knobs on that data so you can take action based on this new-found information.

Outside of Puppet itself, I think 2012 will be an interesting year, too. We’re a bit isolated from it up here in Portland, but there’s an interesting tech/cloud bubble going on in Silicon Valley, and I’ve got a lot of friends who see a cloud winter on the way. Personally, I think we’re finally leaving the world of pure-hype clouds and 2012 is when real-world companies start figuring out how to invest practically in the cloud, and it’s also when the cloud vendors will start to separate. Hopefully we won’t see any more “Enabling the Cloud for Business!” banners, but I’m not getting my hopes up.

I think 2011 has been a critical year for devops. Almost no one I talked to had heard of it in 2010, but this year it seems to have taken over. I can think of three long-standing conferences that had a major focus on devops, and it has gained visibility up and down the organization. The only downside is there’s still a lot of disagreement on what it means and how people can take advantage of it, but great tech movements are powered by passion and vagueness, and devops looks to be the driver for innovation in operations in the next ten years or so.

Here’s looking forward to another scary, great, fast, tedious, invigorating, draining, and amazing year.

I’m thrilled to announce that VMware, Google Ventures, and Cisco have joined existing investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, True Ventures, and Radar Partners in our $8.5 million Series C financing.  Gene Kim, author of VisibleOps and founder of Tripwire, has also invested.

It’s an exciting milestone for our company.  In 2005, after years of working with and on a range of IT management tools, I started Puppet Labs with the mission of building great tools for system administrators.  We wanted to build the best tools, but we also wanted to build tools that sysadmins actually enjoyed using, tools that were easy enough for anyone but powerful enough for everyone.

Great design was never considered a key feature in software for IT, but we stayed focused, and later that year we released the first open source version of Puppet.  Since then, together with growing numbers of community members and employees, we have built and refined Puppet such that tens of thousands of sysadmins in thousands of organizations around the world have come to rely on it to automate their IT operations.  Inspired by this adoption – and wanting to make these powerful tools even more accessible to all sysadmins – earlier this year we released our first commercial product, Puppet Enterprise, to a reception that’s exceeded even our own high expectations.

Demand > Supply

So why bother raising more money?  Simply put, the market demand for our products is outstripping our ability to satisfy it through organic growth alone.  Consider the following:

• Last week, InfoWorld announced that #1 of its “Top Ten Emerging Enterprise Technologies” is “private cloud orchestration” and noted Puppet’s leadership;
• Amazon recently responded to the demand for Puppet by bundling Puppet into their Amazon Linux EC2 images;
• The Wall Street Journal last month noted that the demand for sysadmins with Puppet skills grew more than 200% year-over-year;
• In September, Bloomberg Businessweek’s article on Puppet Labs underscored our momentum, highlighting that our products accelerated customers’ “transition to cloud computing”;
• Recognition of our thought leadership in DevOps, a revolution in IT operations, grew this year such that our insights are widely sought and cited, as evidenced as recently as earlier this month in The Register’s “Cloud’s New Rules” article.

Enter VMware, Google, and Cisco

This combination of strong momentum and the challenges of a fast-growing startup led us to seek the best partners we could find for the next leg of our journey.  We wanted partners with insights into the trends driving our industry, who understand our customers, and who get the unique nature of our approach to IT automation.  Given these goals, VMware, Google, and Cisco are an ideal fit, both for us and for our customers.

As trends go, while at times it’s difficult to separate reality from hype, it’s clear that virtualization and cloud computing are disrupting our industry at every layer in the stack. Amidst this chaos, VMware has carved-out impressive leadership in virtualization and private cloud computing.  And Google, in order to scale their businesses to meet exponentially growing demand, pioneered many of the concepts of cloud computing that are just now being commercialized for the broader market.  Such partners provide us with an incredibly powerful crystal ball into the dynamics and impact of these trends.

With these disruptive trends, we see our mission as enabling customers to take full advantage of their resulting benefits; thus the desire to work with partners who understand our customer, the system administrator.  Here, both VMware and Cisco are trusted, strategic partners of IT organizations worldwide; they understand the challenges facing system administrators to deliver ever shorter change cycles while maintaining enterprise-class service levels.  Working together, we’ll be able to build software that allows system administrators to deliver business-critical results with both higher quality and greater agility.

Finally, for us, how we achieve these results is as important as the results themselves, and finding partners who understand the value of our approach was critical.  These partners have hands-on, in-production-at-scale experience with Puppet – in some cases, going back several years.  Not only do their experiences validate the dramatic productivity improvements which our approach delivers – from 10s of nodes per sysadmin our competitors see to 100s and even 1000s that our users routinely experience – they also recognize the agility, portability, and insight that Puppet enables.  We’re humbled that their experiences with our product motivated exploration and consummation of a closer relationship.

The Road Ahead

How will we use these new financial and partner resources?  From the enthusiastic reception of our recently released commercial product, Puppet Enterprise 2.0, it’s clear that doubling down on designing powerful IT automation tools that are easy to use – and, going forward, integrated with the our new partners’ products – will result in tremendous benefits for system administrators.  In particular, we will invest more in designing products that allows our users to move faster, with more information, and across a wider selection of technologies than ever before, as it’s clear is necessary to take full advantage of the disruptions of virtualization and cloud computing.  In addition, our community over the years has consistently provided great feedback and guidance on our technology, and these new financial resources enable us to increase our investment in both community and platform.

I’ll wrap-up with a round of thank-yous.  Specifically, thanks to our community members for their ongoing engagement and collaboration, our existing and new investors for partnering with us on this journey, our customers for trusting our software to help them run their businesses, and our employees for their passion, intelligence, and drive to build awesome IT automation tools for system administrators.

Stay tuned for more – it’s going to be a fantastic 2012.

- Luke

Additional Resources

• Read the Series C press release
• The Wall Street Journal:  “‘Puppet’ Masters In High Demand”
• InfoWorld: “Top Ten Emerging Enterprise Technologies”
• The Register: “Cloud’s New Rules”
• Learn more about Puppet Enterprise 2.0

The day after the party is always the hardest. As you brush your teeth, you remember all of the things you accomplished the night before: the people you met, the names you have forgotten, the number of extremely large Puppet t-shirts you somehow acquired, and two or three OSL mugs you carried across town back to your hotel. Perhaps those last few things only apply if you attended the Puppet Labs OSCON party last week.

Here at Puppet, we have our own list of accomplishments, and a lot of it has to do with you.

We are proud to announce that at this party:

• 784 participants entered the building
• Around $1500 of spirit, 3 kegs of beer, 40 lbs of ice, and 2000 sandwiches were consumed
• Thousands of memorable conversations took place—there is an old Chinese proverb that is roughly translated to this: a single conversation across the table with a wise person is worth a month’s study of books.

We had a party at Puppet Labs because we hold individuals like you in high regard—individuals who value curiosity, self-motivation, and adaptability. By hosting networking parties like the one you attended, we expose ourselves to a wealth of knowledge and inspiration. So thank you, for attending, socializing, drinking, and having a blast.

With that said, I am going to bluntly state that if you have the above-mentioned values and have a passion for what Puppet is all about, come work for us. We’ll have a grand time.

Moreover, attend PuppetConf in September so that we can keep having these conversations.

Lastly, thank you to OSUOSL (Oregon State University Open Source Lab) for their donation to the party. For more information or to donate, please visit their website.

Keep in touch, and see you soon.

(Our Pro Services Engineer Gary Larizza took the photo above and many more of the night; check them out!)

You’ve got a great idea, and you’re starting a tech company. What’s next? Luke recently addressed that question with twelve helpful opinions in a Software CEO feature: Startup, Funding, Design, and Hiring Tips from Puppet Labs CEO.

A few of our favorites:

Tip #1: Companies are organic beasts. Don’t expect to tame them.

Interestingly, Kanies doesn’t have formal education in software development; his Bachelor’s Degree, from Reed College, is in chemistry.

“Science degrees are one of the best ways to learn how to think,” Kanies says. “Running a company is all about understanding the system of running your company.

“The company I’m trying to run is more like an organic being than anything I’ve ever seen. You can’t just push it one way or another and get the expected result; it very much has a life of its own.”

Tip #8: Use your services people for usability testing.

“We have a professional services team that works with people all the time,” Kanies says. “They sit down with brand-new customers to watch how the software is used. If it sucks, our customers don’t just suffer, we do — because it takes our services people 10 times longer than it should.

“When I first started selling, this is exactly what I was doing: I’d work with the customer during the day, then go back to my hotel room at night and sand off the rough edges.”

If this topic is especially near and dear to your heart, come up to Portland this June and catch Luke’s “Diary of an Open Source Sysadmin Entrepreneur” session at Open Source Bridge.

As most of you realize by now, Puppet 2.7 was released under the Apache 2.0 license instead of under the GPL, and Facter has already been released under the Apache license. My goal in this post is to explain why, and what effects you might expect to see as a result.

We’ve been talking about the possibility of this change for about two years, but it was only in the last six months that it’s been solidified as the right plan. For the vast majority of people, this change won’t affect you at all—Puppet is still open source, and under one of the most open licenses available. For a few of you, however, this license change will make it easier to embed Puppet into your software, ship it as part of a solution you’re building, or contribute code to it.

Our goal at Puppet Labs, and my goal since I started the company and the project, has been to have Puppet everywhere. I want every OS to ship with Puppet, I want every appliance to use Puppet, and I want every device that can’t run Puppet to speak its language and still integrate with it. Heck, I want to replace the package manifest formats with Puppet’s language. I’m a big believer in open source, but for strictly practical reasons. Puppet always had to be open source, because I couldn’t get the kind of ubiquity that I wanted with a purely commercial product—too much of our infrastructure is already open, and too many sysadmins understand the risks of locking yourself into software you can’t control and have no visibility into. Also, when I started the project I had no reputation and, um, no money; open source was a great way to bootstrap the company and project with very little expense.

With the GPL, realizing this goal of ubiquity was very difficult—some companies are comfortable with the GPL and have no problems including software released under it, but plenty of other companies are dreadfully afraid of the potential for it to force releasing of other code, whether or not that fear is rational. With Apache, these companies can focus on whether Puppet will make their solution better, and not worry about whether they’ll have to make significant business changes in order to use it. You won’t see me making arguments about freedom here (and you probably won’t have much luck engaging in such a conversation with me separately), but you have already seen that my practical perspective on this drives toward open source as much as anything else.

To me, the choice between GPL and Apache was never about which one is more free. It has always been about which one can best accomplish the goals of the project, and possibly which can do the best job of helping me fund those goals. In the end, choosing GPL means more companies that want to partner with us have to pay us, else their software must also be open, while choosing Apache means anyone can use, embed, and extend Puppet without having to worry about it affecting any other software. In other words, the choice between GPL and Apache for us as a company largely comes down to the GPL enabling fewer partnerships but some number of which that pay us, while Apache enables far more partnerships but few (if any) that pay us.

Puppet is primarily meant to be directly used by sysadmins. Switching to Apache, and hopefully seeing far more integrations and embedding, seems like a good trade-off. We give up business we might never have in exchange for relationships right now. Thus, the goal of ubiquity feels a bit closer.

I know this argument doesn’t persuade all of you, and I’ve already exchanged emails with one person who is convinced that this change means Puppet is no longer free software, but it is my sincere hope that we can quickly get back to writing and releasing software rather than talking about licenses. And, of course, it’s also my sincere hope that we see far more people embedding and integrating with Puppet.

As always, please contact me directly at luke@puppetlabs.com if you have any questions or concerns.

We are excited to be a program development sponsor for The Ada Initiative, a non-profit committed to increasing the involvement and involvement opportunities of women in open technology and culture. The cause is near and dear to our heart, as CEO Luke sums up:

The open source community needs to recruit and retain more women. Sponsoring the Ada Initiative is an easy way for any organization to make a difference. It also demonstrates our company’s commitment to a a positive work environment for women and our conviction that equal opportunity in technology in open source is critical for its long term success.”

About the Ada Initiative

The Ada Initiative is a non-profit organization dedicated to increasing participation of women in open technology and culture, founded by long-time women in open technology activists and programmers Valerie Aurora and Mary Gardiner. The Ada Initiative is named for Countess Ada Lovelace, widely recognized as the world’s first computer programmer. The Ada Initiative partners with organizations and communities to increase the participation of women in ways that shape the technology, such as software design and development, writing for Wikipedia, and community leadership.

Puppet Labs is proud to introduce the newest product in our suite: Puppet Aura Power or PAP.  PAP is a 4th generation aura reading, auditing and holistic configuration management framework.  Nature gave us all the ability we need to see Auras, but since the emergence of Cloud and aura virtualisation most of our inherent abilities simply do not scale.  PAP provides the ability to deploy a fully scalable aura architecture that addresses your personal and organizational needs. Our PAP strongly draws from ancient traditions like Kabbalah, Magick and the Ancient Path of the Old Man of Cloud.

Puppet Aura Power is easy to use too!  All that is required is the knowledge of how to use your senses together with your conscious effort. You can see PAP at work in our exclusive screencast:

Red Monk analyst Michael Coté described the new product and its impact on the industry in a recent comment: “We know that proper Aura management is more of a cultural shift than a technology one. Still you need the tools to manage it, or else you wake up in the middle of the desert married to a three-legged coyote, asking yourself, “how did I get here?” and drinking martinis that turn out to be handfuls of sand. What you want is something that stops your Aura from controlling you, and lets you pull the strings. Little wonder that Puppet Aura Power is the industry leader for Aura management. From personal experiences, I can tell you it certainly knocks the socks off a handful of gravel you might have had some supposed truck-stop bruja blow on – and my three-legged, new wife loves it!”

Puppet Labs CEO, Luke Kanies adds, “There is nothing magic in the Universe, except our limited understanding of its nature. What we think we know about ourselves now is just a tiny drop in the Ocean of Knowledge in our personal CMDBs. Puppet Aura Power not only gives us ownership and stewardship of all that Knowledge, but more than that, it allows us to dynamically audit and re-configure our auras.”

We have just completed the migration of our legacy Reductive Labs GitHub account to our new Puppet Labs account.

If you were watching or had forked the former reductivelabs account repositories you should now move to the new repositories. All forks should have had their base migrated from the legacy account to the new account automatically. You will have to re-watch any previously watched repositories in the new account.

To migrate your local respositories you can do this one of two ways:

1. Update the .git/config file in the repository, changing the appropriate remote:

[remote "origin"]
        url = git://github.com/reductivelabs/puppet.git
        fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*

to:

[remote "origin"]
        url = git://github.com/puppetlabs/puppet.git
        fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*

2. You can remove existing remotes using the git command line tools.

a. List your current remotes

$ git remote -v

b. Find the current remote that references the reductivelabs account and delete it.

$ git remote rm origin

c. Add the new remote.

$ git remote add git://github.com/puppelabs/puppet.git

Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have issues with this process!