Puppet Labs has been a busy place in the last month: we announced PuppetConf and released the very first seats for the Puppet Professional Certification Program (more details coming soon), we also announced our support for OpenStack and we announced PuppetDB, affectionately known around the office as project Greyskull. As we move ahead into May and June we hope to see you at some of the following events:

May 19 – Puppet Camp Los Angeles: Senior Developer Deepak Giridharagopal will introduce PuppetDB, and the Puppet projects team lead Daniel Pittman will share the Puppet roadmap for 2012.

May 21 – Find us at EMC world, we’ll be around and looking to find you. Follow us @puppetlabs to find out where we are.

We’ve announced new Puppet Camps for June and July:

• Southeast Asia in Kuala Lumpur on June 5th
• Sydney on June 8th (tickets are almost gone!)
• District of Columbia on June 19th
• Puppet Camp Boston on June 22
• Chicago on July 23rd

And don’t forget about our previously announced our European camps in Dublin, Ireland on July 6th and Geneva, Switzerland on July 11th.

After the end of July we’ll be working to produce an epic PuppetConf in San Francisco on September 27th and 28th. Register now to guarantee a seat. Like many of our Puppet Camps, PuppetConf is sure to sell out.

We’re also happy to offer you a 10% discount to Velocity on June 25-28. Just use code PUPPETLABS when you register and then come find us at booth #517 and check out presentations from James Turnbull and Luke Kanies at Velocity.



We’re looking forward to connecting with you this summer.

Registration for PuppetConf ’12 is now open. We’re in a new city and a new facility, with new tracks and new programs. Look forward to 5 concurrent tracks over 2 days focusing on all things operations. Our new venue offers one large theater for keynotes, while our second auditorium will be dedicated to Puppet Community presentations and hacking space. We’re introducing a hands-on lab component to the conference, and we’re happy to announce that we’ll be offering the first ever Puppet Admin and Puppet Developer Certification exams at PuppetConf.

With over 70 speakers, 600+ community members, and the Puppet Labs team, PuppetConf is a must-attend event. We’re looking forward to seeing you in San Francisco!

Here’s a quick recap of last year:

All 2011 talks can be viewed on the Puppet Labs YouTube Channel.

Spring is the time to be in New York. We know it, and apparently so do our partners. Whether you live in or around New York or just happen to be in town visiting over the next two weeks come find us at these awesome events:

• Wed 4/18 – Come meet us at the AWS Cloud for Start-Ups & Developers social hosted by Amazon Web Services!
• Thur 4/19 – Stop by booth “S2″ at the AWS Cloud Summit to talk to our Puppet experts, or get some free schwag.
• Fri 4/20 – Meet Ohad Levy at the PuppetNYC meetup.
• Wed 4/25 – Check out our presentation at the inaugural EucaDay conference.

And, last but not least:

• Fri 4/27 – Join us for an awesome Puppet Camp NYC featuring Puppet Labs’ own Luke Kanies, James Turnbull, Kelsey Hightower and Eric Shamow!

Just over a week ago, we (Nigel and Carl) spent an awesome (but very cold!) weekend hosting the Configuration Management Dev Room at FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Software Developer’s European Meeting in absolutely-not-sunny Brussels, Belgium.

There were over 430 speakers sharing their knowledge of this space on topics ranging from Linux on the desktop to open cloud computing and kernel development. For the second year running we had a very successful Dev Room, where we again packed out the room (and unfortunately had to turn people away due to hitting capacity).

We had a great range of talks covering a variety of solutions in the Config Management space, the Normation team showed off their Rudder GUI for CFEngine, Zane from RedHat introduced us to the Matahari project for remote API access, Mikhail from CFEngine gave us a simplified explanation of Promise Theory, and Ralph demonstrated the Immobilien Scout 24 home-grown system built around RPM.

A highlight for us as Puppet folks was R. Tyler Croy’s talk on running the Jenkins project with Puppet, and how it helped him bring sanity to infrastructure running out of control. He packed the house out and his hand-drawn slides really stood out. It was also great to see the OpenNMS team show two integrations between OpenNMS and Puppet to consolidate node views.

At a higher level, another packed room saw Mitchell Hashimoto, the creator of Vagrant, explain DevOps as a range, not an absolute. It was a very insightful talk on how IT shops can move towards devops practices one step at a time, making small investments towards a larger goal.

We thank everyone who participated at FOSDEM and thank the organizers for allowing us to be part of such an amazing conference. As Dev Room organizers we have nothing but positive feedback to the FOSDEM crew about how well-run everything was, it was definitely one of the smoother conference experiences I’ve been part of. Given the challenge involved in running a conference of this size, that’s no mean feat.

Unfortunately the Dev Rooms aren’t recorded to video by default, but if you’re interested in seeing some of the many other talks that went on, there is a FOSDEM YouTube channel for streaming, and a video archive for direct download.

We’re sure FOSDEM 2013 will be even grander, and we look forward to hopefully being involved again.

Puppet Camp Atlanta was a fantastic community event and is be the template for our continuing Puppet Camp series. In many ways Atlanta was an experiment to see if our community could support a 1-day event structure. It can, and the meeting was productive and filled with rich content. A loose speaking schedule allowed for a lot of great conversations over coffee and open Q&A sessions with Puppet Engineers. More than ever before, the Puppet team felt as though we were able to connect with participants to help tackle the tough issues that our users face in real world situations. I strongly encourage you to participate in an upcoming Puppet Camp in your city.

We have 7 Puppet Camps in the works, so look for your city on our complete list. If you don’t see your greater area represented and think you can help us find 100 puppeteers eager to converse, reach out and we’ll see what we can do to bring an event to your city.

And don’t forget PuppetConf is September 27th and 28th at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco, California. A call for participation, registration details, and sponsorship prospectus will be available by March. PuppetConf has an estimated 60 speaking opportunities and will span all topics operations, DevOps, Puppet, and the Puppet Ecosystem.

Join us for an upcoming Puppet Camp:

Atlanta, GA – Friday, February 3rd – Register

Edinburgh, Scotland – Friday March 23rd – Register

(Click on “Booking“)

Puppet Camps are one-day, regional events held 6-8 times per year. Puppet Camp features 4 to 5 talks followed by a few sessions of unconference. Registration costs, co-located events, and speakers will vary from event to event.

If you’d like to speak at or sponsor a Puppet Camp please contact us.

We are aiming to organize Puppet Camps in New York City and in Stockholm in March or early April, more information will be posted as it becomes available on the PuppetCamp Community page.

PuppetConf will persist as a multi-day user and community conference. We have a ton of changes coming to PuppetConf ’12 to look forward to, so mark your calendar for PuppetConf 2012: September 27-28 at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco, CA.

We also look forward to seeing you at SCALE 10X for Puppet Training at Scale University (use our discount code “PUP12″ for 40% off registration to SCALE and Puppet training), and at the Configuration Management Room at FOSDEM.

Last week was Usenix LISA ’11 in Boston. This was the 25th year of the conference, and the final reception included a perusal of the last 25 years of LISA, highlighting the history of the long-standing community. Old friends reuniting brought the conference center to a rolling boil of laughter and conversation. The past experiences of LISA and its participants helped make the latest conference great. If you’re feeling nostalgic, check out the LISA site archive.

If you attended LISA you were hopefully able to visit us at the DevOps, Intro to Config Management, or our Puppet Birds of a Feather Sessions. If not, we hope you caught Eric Shamow’s presentation of his paper “Getting to Elastic: Adapting a Legacy Vertical Application Environment for Scalability,” or Luke Kanies’ talk on DevOps, or got a chance to chat and watch a Puppet Enterprise demo at our booth. If you couldn’t make it to LISA, catch us at SCALE 10x in Los Angeles in January, where we’ll have a half-day training session at SCALE University and the LA Puppet User Group will host a BoF if we can find a good time (stay tuned).

We’ve also announced a Call for Papers for The Configuration Management Room at FOSDEM. Get your abstracts in by December 31, and join us in Brussels, Belgium this February for all things configuration management.

With Puppet Enterprise 2.0 released and a belly full of turkey, we turn our eyes toward a busy end of the year. Join us the first week of December in Boston for LISA ’11 and use Discount Code: 50LISA11PUP if you haven’t registered yet. Come by booth 507 for a PE 2.0 demo and a Puppet Labs t-shirt. Keep an eye on our Los Angeles and NYC user groups—they’ll be meeting mid-December while Puppet Labs engineers are in town. Eric Shamow will also be wandering around Drupal Camp (Saturday 12/10/11), shoot him an email to meet in Manhattan.

Find Us December 8 & 9 at Booth 507 and at the following LISA sessions:

• DevOps BoF with Kris Buytaert, Tuesday, December 6th at 7:00 pm in Gardner.
• Los Alamos National Labs talks Config Management, Tuesday, December 6th at 9:00 am in Republic B (see the Los Alamos National Labs case study).
• Puppet Labs BoF, Wednesday December 7th at 7:00 pm in Fairfax A.
• CEO Luke Kanies builds IronMan, DevOps machine for awesomeness. Thursday, December 8th at 2:00 pm, Back Bay A.
• Professional Service Engineer Eric Shamow delivers his paper, Getting to Elastic, Thursday, December 8th at 2:00 pm, Constitution Ballroom.
• Build a Cloud Day, Friday, December 9th at 9:00 am.
• Nan Liu delivers a Puppet Training at LISA Friday, December 9th at 9:00 am, F3 in Fairfax A.

Hadoop World, hosted by Cloudera for the Apache Hadoop project happened this past week in New York City. Puppet has a growing relationship with Cloudera, Hadoop, and their users. As savvy users begin storing endless petabytes of information, their infrastructures inevitably increase. Puppet allows admins to grow those deployments with ease, helped by the strong user community. A group of Puppet/Hadoop users have built modules for deploying CDH3 (see below for more).

The conference itself was great. A bizarre mix of executives and young quants made for an interesting array of apparel choices ranging from 3-piece suits to torn jean shorts. The team at Cloudera did a fantastic job keeping the talks on time and relevant, and all of the presentations were recorded and should be available from Cloudera in a few weeks.

I would suggest checking out the Etsy and Bit.ly talks. Both speakers showed an amazing passion for problem solving in the big data space and delivered talks that were relevant and entertaining. If you’re a Bit.ly user, you might benefit from this excellent Bit.ly hack: By shortening links to images and embedding them into a forum or other non-local content host like blog comments, you can track impressions of the image or through the bit.ly+ page. Every time the image loads Bit.ly will track a hit. While not robust feedback, it provides a basic level of analytics for pages outside of your domain.

All in all, Hadoop World offered an interesting insight into how to manage big data sets. Companies like Disney are collecting all kinds of information at unprecedented rates—last year, the organization generated more data points than the previous 80 years combined. These companies understand that their data is important, even as they develop strategies for how to handle it. IT storage, processing, and management tools and practices are contributing to the biggest benefits of big data.

Related posts:

• Deploying Hstack with Puppet
• Deploying Hadoop with Puppet
• Deploying Hbase with Puppet