Teyo Tyree, Puppet Labs’ Vice President and Head of Professional Services, recently presented on Puppet’s usefulness as pertains to system management and compliance at GOSCON. His slides can be perused with the rest of our slideshows in presentations.
Attending the Puppet Master training course is an investment in time and resources with an immediate return. The information you will learn will give you the ability to deploy puppet and begin automating your infrastructure quickly and with confidence. This article describes the information covered in the Puppet Master training course, the experience and expertise of the instructors, and the specific benefits we provide to help you get more work done in a shorter time.
The goal of training is to give you are comprehensive review of Puppet’s features and potential. Puppet Master training is a mix of lecture and labs designed to prepare new members of an organization already using Puppet, and to empower experienced sysadmins wanting to get the most from Puppet by learning the advanced features. During the 3-day class attendees will learn how to configure Puppet and a Puppetmaster, they will learn different resource types, and will learn how to define virtual and exported resources, meta-parameters, dependencies, and events. Puppet Labs uses the exact same curriculum as part of its new employee orientation and often sends new employees to public trainings. At the end of training an attendee will have the knowledge they need to use Puppet to tackle difficult problems quickly.
Several members of Solbright Operations team attended Puppet training in New York this year. We are happy to report that we realized excellent value, and readily recommend the experience to shops considering,
implementing, or already running Puppet. Training is ran by hands-on experts who are deeply involved in the ongoing development of Puppet, and have implemented Puppet-based solutions for environments across the world. Sessions are structured to ensure key concepts are thoroughly explained and hammered home with well-designed hands-on labs. Presentations and handouts are of excellent quality and are kept in sync with the evolution of Puppet software.
Alex Fomin, Technical Operations Manager, Solbright Inc.
Our courses are designed to be hands on learning experiences. Attendees aren’t just lectured at, they are engaged. Our class sizes hover around 12-14 people but often times are hosted with as few as 5 and all classes are capped at 20. Often times our Sales and Professional Services teams are in the same area as our trainings and will drop in to talk with students during lunch. At a recent training in the bay area 7 Puppet Labs employees were present at lunch. During training students are able to engage 1:1 with Puppet Labs Staff. They are able to ask questions and can learn how to use Puppet to solve the specific issues ailing their organization.
During the training students receive a light breakfast, lunch, and usually a slew of snacks in addition to instruction. Students also receive a copy of the Puppet Labs Training Slides, are invited to join the Puppet Master LinkedIn network, and a Puppet Labs T-shirt. The fee for each student is usually set at $2,395 but an $200 Early Bird Discount is offered for students registering at least 2 weeks in advance. Private training, along with a variety of other servies are also available.
We’re happy to announce dates for January, February, and March:
See our full training schedule for more information.
Puppet training gave me a great foundation for using Puppet in our environment. We have been able to use the best practices that I learned to effectively leverage Puppet.
Paul Nguyen, Genentech
Whether you were able to join us at Puppet Camp last week or missed out, here is a quick recap:
Wednesday started off with simultaneously the best and most awkward dinner I’ve had in a while. While searching for a reservation for 20 people at 7pm in a city at near capacity I had the good fortune to trust Yelp recommendations which led me to take our group a small hole in the wall Pakistani restaurant. True to it’s roots, Shalimar offered a family style meal sans alcohol. Those opining for beer were silenced by the sharp flavors and spices the meal offered and the family style plate sharing bonded the Puppet team and some of our guests at the Serrano in unexpected ways.
Thursday hit like the first splash of water from the shower head: it’s sharp, cold, and confusing but you have to just wait it out. The crowed poured in and our speakers arrived. Breakfast was laid out and most importantly the wireless was working. Our MC Deepak opened with a little stand-up and tid-bits of information and before long Luke announced that Puppet Labs had acquired mCollective, a deal that literally occurred at the registration table mere minutes earlier. A huge thanks is owed to our presenters R.I. Pienaar, Jeff McCune, and Richard Crowley. Their slides and video presentations will be available soon. The night ended at Swig for a drink reception at which attendees consumed a copious amount of alcohol, the tab for which was graciously sponsored by Canonical & Puppet Labs, and then turned into a spread sheet for Friday morning.
A more sluggish crowd arrived Friday morning and proceeded to consume 180 cans of Red Bull. Big thanks to Paul Nasrat, Jason Wright, John Adams, and Alessandro Franceschi for their presentations. Our morning break was interrupted by a fire alarm and all 140 of us marched like ants down 11 flights of stairs but the rest of the day went relatively smooth. A beginners session was offered to participants by Puppet Lab’s own Dan Bode in the afternoon. If you were interested in Dan’s presentation and the “Puppet Newbies” breakout session on Thursday don’t forget to mark your calendars for the 3-day Puppet Master Training offered in the Bay Area on December 7th-9th. Puppet Camp closed with a panel discussion that allowed members from the Puppet Community to discuss the future of the project.
All in all I think Puppet Camp was a success but please provide any feedback you have on our Puppet Camp Survey. Again a big thanks to our sponsors RightScale, NetworkRedux, Canonical, and Red Bull. Also, thanks to Gary Larizza for all of the pictures.
Whether you were able to join us at Puppet Camp last week or missed out, here is a quick recap:
Wednesday started off with simultaneously the best and most awkward dinner I’ve had in a while. While searching for a reservation for 20 people at 7pm in a city at near capacity I had the good fortune to trust Yelp recommendations which led me to take our group to a small hole in the wall Pakistani restaurant. True to its roots, Shalimar offered a family style meal sans alcohol. Those opining for beer were silenced by the sharp flavors and spices the meal offered and the family style plate sharing bonded the Puppet team and some of our guests at the Serrano in unexpected ways.
Thursday hit like the first splash of water from the shower head: it’s sharp, cold, and confusing but you have to just wait it out. The crowed poured in and our speakers arrived. Breakfast was laid out and most importantly the wireless was working. Our MC Deepak opened with a little stand-up and tid-bits of information and before long Luke announced that Puppet Labs had acquired mCollective, a deal that literally occurred at the registration table mere minutes earlier. A huge thanks is owed to our presenters R.I. Pienaar, Jeff McCune, and Richard Crowley. Their slides and video presentations will be available soon. The night ended at Swig for a drink reception at which attendees consumed a copious amount of alcohol, the tab for which was graciously sponsored by Canonical & Puppet Labs, and then turned into a spread sheet for Friday morning.
A more sluggish crowd arrived Friday morning and proceeded to consume 180 cans of Red Bull. Big thanks to Paul Nasrat, Jason Wright, John Adams, and Alessandro Franceschi for their presentations. Our morning break was interrupted by a fire alarm and all 140 of us marched like ants down 11 flights of stairs but the rest of the day went relatively smooth. A beginners session was offered to participants by Puppet Lab’s own Dan Bode in the afternoon. If you were interested in Dan’s presentation and the “Puppet Newbies” breakout session on Thursday don’t forget to mark your calendars for the 3-day Puppet Master Training offered in the Bay Area on December 7th-9th. Puppet Camp closed with a panel discussion that allowed members from the Puppet Community to discuss the future of the project.
All in all I think Puppet Camp was a success but please provide any feedback you have on our Puppet Camp Survey. Again a big thanks to our sponsors RightScale, NetworkRedux, Canonical, and Red Bull. Also, thanks to Gary Larizza for all of the pictures.
We’re only a few short days away from Puppet Camp. Here is a solid line up of speakers and breaks. We look forward to seeing you in San Francisco. If you haven’t signed up yet, get your ticket now.
Breakfast
Introduction
Keynote by Luke Kanies, CEO of Puppet Labs
Presentation by R.I Pienaar, Founder of mCollective
Morning Tea
Presentation by Digant Kasundra, Stanford University
Presentation by Richard Crowley, Founder of DevStructure
Lunch
Breakout Session
Breakout Session
Afternoon Tea
Breakout Session
Breakout Session
Drink Reception at Swig
Breakfast
Introduction
Presentation by John Adams, Operations Tech Lead at Twitter
Presentation by Paul Nasrat, Google
Morning Tea
Presentation by Jason Wright, Google
Presentation by Alessandro Franceschi, Lab42
Lunch
Breakout Session
Breakout Session
Afternoon Tea
Breakout Session
Breakout Session
We’re happy to announce three more speakers for Puppet Camp:
Paul Nasrat works at Google, London as a Site Reliability Engineer. He has a background in both systems administration and development, having worked for an assortment of companies. He’s passionate about collaborative working between teams, automation and loves debugging gnarly problems. He will be presenting reFacter – Moving Facter Forward
Jason Wright works at Google and manages their Puppet deployment. Jason will be talking about Google’s load balancing rollout, how they monitor Puppet using the REST API to make catalog requests and will touch on the performance testing that he’s been doing recently.
Jason has been with Google for over seven years. Prior to owning Puppet he worked their internal Ubuntu team providing Hardy based server, desktop and laptop distributions using Puppet and ran the corporate e-mail service for Google.com in the days before Gmail.
Lastly, Alessandro Franceschi will be presenting Re-Use Your Modules:
Techniques and Approaches to Modules Reusability. Alessandro started to use Puppet in 2007 deploying the webfarm of Banca d’Italia. In the following years he has been interested in developing reusable modules with support for different operating systems, the result of this effort is the Example42 modules collection, an ongoing work with particular focus on reusability, interoperability and multi OS support.
Alessandro will focus on some techniques and approaches that can be used to create reusable modules that adapt themselves to different operating systems and projects.
Puppet Camp features four short talks and four participant generated breakout sessions each day. We’re also really excited announce RightScale and Network Redux as our co-sponsors.
We’re pleased to announce a brief list of presenters and topics for Puppet Camp North America. We’ve got a couple of great talks to look forward to and are still looking for a presenter or two. If the talks listed below spark an idea for a talk please contact us. Also we would like to announce the launch of two new pages on our site that contain some useful information on Puppet Camp that will help you plan and prepare for your trip, Puppet Camp General Information and Puppet Camp FAQ. You can also register for the event at this page.
Up first each morning you’ll hear from our MC Deepak Giridharagopal. Deepak is a Systems Architect at Dell. He is an active member of the Puppet Community and has contributed code to Puppet core. You’ll also hear from Luke Kanies. He’ll deliver a short keynote that will shed light on Puppet’s past, present, and future; discuss the future and goals of Puppet Labs; and share new information about Puppet’s Roadmap, Forge and Facter.
Digant Kasundra leads Stanford’s Puppet implementation. His talk, Puppet in the IT Organization, will touch on the drivers Stanford had for deploying Puppet, and how Puppet helps manage infrastructure and users. In talking about drivers he plans to discuss how strict style guides and coding standards benefit Stanford’s implementation and how the Puppet Community could benefit if a standard is developed among systems administrators. Lastly, he will show you how Puppet can help keep upper management happy through integration with ITIL and a CMDB.
R.I. Pienaar will be delivering Introduction to The Marionette Collective. He will demonstrate how to use mCollective with Puppet and showcase some of it’s orchestration capabilities.
Jeff McCune is presenting Use Cases of the Puppet Ruby DSL. Using Puppet’s new Ruby domain specific language provides a number of interesting benefits but also presents some new hurdles. Jeff will examine interesting examples of effectively using the Ruby DSL and explore potential best practices when utilizing Ruby Puppet manifests.
You’ll also hear from John Adams. He will be presenting on how Twitter runs Puppet on a large scale (many thousands of servers). He will talk about the lessons learned during their use of Puppet, and how people should use start using configuration management early in startups. He’ll also discuss how Twitter manages users with Puppet, LDAP, and custom code.
Above is only a brief account of what is to come so keep checking back for more details.
As I tore off the first month of my over-sized school-year calendar I was reminded of my first week at Puppet Labs. I woke up early, made breakfast, and caught a bus into downtown arriving 30 minutes early only to be reminded that I didn’t yet have a key to the office. I plopped down in front of the door to wait for someone else to arrive, and opened my notebook to review the topics for my first official meeting with my new boss. Scrawled in my notebook are limited, and partially illegible jottings I took from our previous conversation. Unfortunately, between his Australian accent, frequently altered speech tempo, and foreign use of commonplace terms, and the fact that my penmanship skills hover around a 3rd grade level, all I could make out is one line: “Puppet Camp-do it.”
With that extravagant amount initial information, the last four weeks, James’ guidance, and the help of our wonderful in-town event planner Julie, I have hobbled together what I think will be a pretty awesome event. So without further ado I give you the top five reasons to attend Puppet Camp:
Puppet, and Puppet Camp are user driven. Without the community the product, and the event would fall to pieces. With that in mind Puppet Camp is run as an “unconference” or “open-space” conference. Essentially, while we have some morning lectures planned, they can be influenced by the audience and deviate from their topic or forget about it all together depending on your wants. Similarly our afternoon breakout sessions are completely user generated. During morning break and lunch you have the opportunity to suggest any number of topics for afternoon breakout sessions. Speaking of breaks of course brings us conveniently to…
We’ve got a pretty reasonably sized breakfast of fresh fruit, yogurt, bagels and cream cheese, and muffins to serve along with juice, coffee and tea. Breaks are accompanied by cookies, and soft drinks, and lunch features a soup, salad, roasted veggies, and a sandwich bar buffet with chicken, roast beef, and hummus. While you may be on your own for dinner, we are offering an open bar at Swig on Thursday night which will offer…
Short of sharing a plate of spaghetti, there really isn’t a better way to forge relationships than over a pint and one of Swig’s 150 whiskeys and whiskies. Whether you want to find your next employer, meet Volcane, or just swap stories with other Puppet users, Puppet Camp provides the opportunity. Because of the events’ flexibility, it caters to novice Puppet users, Puppet Masters, and everything in between, behind, and around. You’ll be amazed by the people you’ll meet, the industries and companies they hail from, and the size of their Puppet implementations. As you converse, hopefully…
You’ll learn more about Puppet in 2 days that you could have in a month. You’ll learn about our future goals for the product, trade-secret work-arounds, and a whole host of other information. No matter how active you are in the community there is really no equal to learning, face to face, from other users. The exchange of knowledge Puppet Camp induces is by far its most valuable aspect, which leads me to want to end here but…
If you can stay the weekend you can sign-up to attend Puppet Developers Training starting on Monday, October 11th and ending Wednesday the 13th. Developers training teaches you how to extend Puppet by adding custom facts, types and providers, and more. This class is offered on a limited basis so be sure to sign up if you have the chance.
In addition to all opportunities and benefits listed above, you’ll get some exclusive Puppet Camp swag, and get a well deserved opportunity to visit San Francisco. You can reside with us at the Serrano Hotel using our group discount code or take to the city and explore. I hope you join us for Puppet Camp 2010. We’ve got an awesome line up of presenters and entertainment waiting for you in San Francisco.