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.

Why do we want configuration management? There are plenty of reasons, but at the core of them is that we want to streamline the configuration and deployment of systems. We want this process to be repeatable, well-understood, and predictable. We want to make it deterministic.

Determinism — the idea that a process should result in the same outcome every time it is applied — is not a new idea, but it’s also not one that system administrators apply to their daily work. Can you prove that the bash script you just wrote to deploy your new NoSQL database will work across all of your system configurations? Will it work the same way if you execute it again next week—or next year? Automating the deployment and configuration of systems is meaningless if we can’t guarantee that these systems will complete the configuration process with predictable results.

For years, organizations have tried to handle this problem using scripts to deploy and manage their environments. These scripts evolve over years as they’re passed from admin to admin, growing to contain the personal quirks of their developers and long-irrelevant legacy workarounds. It’s not until a script is needed—usually when the server fails—that sysadmins discover it’s tightly pegged to a particular version of bash or sed, or requires a specific return code from an init script that no longer exists. The script’s lack of predictability impacts organizations at the worst possible time in the development cycle.

Periodically, organizations recognize that these scripts have become unmanageable and will attempt to refactor or rebuild them from scratch, resulting in a whole new cycle of trial-and-error. This tug of war with scripts takes time from other, more valuable tasks. How many times have you fixed or updated the same process when you could have been learning or applying new information to your environment?

Your credibility as an admin is dependent on your ability to construct reliable, stable, consistent systems. It’s critical that the process you employ works in a predictable way every time.

Puppet’s View of the Server

What makes Puppet different from a library of shell scripts, and from other configuration management tools, is that it forms a model of your system configuration prior to performing any activity on the system itself.

Before a single command is executed on a host, Puppet has constructed what we refer to as a “resource graph” of that node’s existing configuration, and determined how your changes will impact that graph. Below is a very simple example of such a resource graph:

It’s a difficult leap for new users, particularly as we as sysadmins are trained to think procedurally and not deterministically. Admins tend to think of processes: managing the server as a group of activities that leave the system in a desired state when properly applied. We spend most of our careers mastering the processes (and trying to pass certification exams that prove we have).

Puppet asks you to think differently about what administration means, and to focus on what the server is supposed to look like after all processes are finished. It doesn’t ignore process, but considers it a means to an end—you tell Puppet what you want the server to look like, and Puppet works out how to get the server there.

Noop and Dry Runs

One of the big advantages of the resource graph model is Puppet’s unique and unrivaled “noop” functionality, which allows you to simulate a change before you deploy it. Other tools can run in some semblance of a dry run or do-nothing mode, but they often repeat back what your script says, without offering the impact on your system as a whole. Puppet understands what your environment currently looks like as of the last Puppet run (represented by the orange rectangle in the below example) and what the end state is supposed to look like (the green parallelogram). Puppet then tells you both what it will do when executed without noop, and how that action would change the overall configuration of your system. These steps are identical in noop mode and in regular execution mode. The only difference is whether or not Puppet performs the action in the red shape at the bottom, or merely reports to you what will happen if you run Puppet.

Where Determinism Poses a Challenge

This resource graph model can be problematic for you if you don’t know what a server is supposed to look like at the end of your administration process. Puppet insists that you understand an application’s impact will be before you begin the process of installing it. This is how it should be. Nothing should be placed on a production system without you, the administrator, being able to fully document and understand the changes that application will impose; yet we are all guilty of starting procedures on systems without fully understanding the impact.

While this deterministic core is at the heart of Puppet, there are still elements that can cause confusion. Until recently, there was an issue with resources being applied in a non-deterministic order on nodes, so that a manifest might compile and execute in one order on one node, and another on a second. This was based on the assumption that all resources are atomic, and is remedied in the Puppet 2.7 and Puppet Enterprise 2.0.

Determinism is not a panacea—you still have to validate that your Puppet manifests do what they’re supposed to, and you should put them through the same rigorous testing you expect of dev environments. But you are able to increase your confidence that something working in your test environment will work in production, and that a proposed change will not interfere with a production environment because of a surprising interaction.

Further Advantages to a Deterministic Approach with Puppet

Aside from noop mode, what do you as an administrator get out of Puppet’s deterministic nature? A few notable benefits:

• Your Puppet manifests describe what your systems look like and how to install them. While there is never a replacement for good long-form documentation, in the real world people rarely have the time to write it. Fortunately, Puppet manifests can serve as accurate documentation of a server’s entire configured environment, from unusual post-install procedures to open ports—and in fact this can be better than written documentation, since it is by definition always up-to-date.
• When you do deploy, that process is automated. Your best and most senior engineer does not have to be the guy who pushes the button—and it’s very unlikely that on deploy night that you will be writing or heavily modifying legacy bash or Perl scripts.

You can ultimately think of the choice between a deterministic and non-deterministic tool as the choice between predictability and randomness, or better, between configuration management and ad-hoc system administration. With Puppet, you think your problem through, saving you time and effort later on. Non-deterministic tools may seem to solve a short-term problem, but you’re merely accruing technical debt.

Related Content:

• How to look at your resource graph in Puppet

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.

It’s come time for us to pick a code name for our next release of Puppet. If you help develop Puppet you may be fairly familiar with our naming system, but for those who haven’t yet contributed to the open source project, we name each version of Puppet after a Muppet.

We use code names because it gives us the flexibility to decide the maturity of a release. By setting features at “Telly” we’ve not committed to “Telly” being a major release or a point release. The code name allows us to holistically review the growth of the project and decide which level of release is most appropriate.

This time we’d like you to pick the name. At the bottom of this post is a place for you to pick your favorite name(s) and send them to us. The Muppet Wiki has a comprehensive list of Muppets. Our only rule is that you pick a name we haven’t used yet that comes after the letter ‘T’ (in recent releases, we narrowed the field by picking names in alphabetical order). Polls close at the end of 2011.

For reference, here’s a table of previous (and therefore ineligible for this contest) code names:

We’re excited that Puppet has been chosen as the 2011 Best Open Source Configuration Management Tool by Linux Journal readers. This is the second year in a row Puppet has earned the honor, and we can’t thank our enthusiastic users and community enough.

From the Linux Journal article: “If you manage greater than zero servers, you will benefit from using a tool like Puppet.”

Related Content:

• Learning Puppet VM
• Join the Puppet Community
• Read the Puppet docs
• The Puppet Project Home

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

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.

We’re pleased to announce the availability of Puppet Enterprise 2.0, a major new release of our powerful yet easy-to-use IT automation software for sysadmins to discover, configure, and manage their infrastructure, on-premise or in the cloud.

Download it here now.  You’ll be up-and-running in less than 5 minutes, and you can manage up to 10 nodes for free.

We’ll be holding live webinars starting today Wednesday, November 16, with our product team to cover the details of the major new capabilities:

• GUI – visually discover, clone, and manage resources
• Cloud Provisioning – create and configure nodes in VMware or Amazon Web Services
• Orchestration – apply simultaneous updates to clusters of nodes with a single command
• Compliance – monitor resources and track changes against a desired-state baseline

These new capabilities provide sysadmins with the agility, portability, and insights they demand for managing today’s dynamic infrastructures.  To learn more, sign-up here now to reserve your spot in one of the webinars – “seating” is limited!

Finally, members of our product team will be demoing Puppet Enterprise 2.0 at LISA in Boston December 4 – 9.  Swing on by, say hello, and check-out Puppet Enterprise 2.0!

Puppetize early and often,

- The Puppet Labs Team

Additional Resources

• Download Puppet Enterprise 2.0 here
• Puppet Enterprise 2.0 Overview
• Sign-up here for Puppet Enterprise 2.0 live webinars
• Puppet Enterprise 2.0 Product Brief

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

Hadoop World is taking place at the Sheraton New York Hotel & Towers, Nov 8th and 9th. While we don’t have a booth at the event, we’d like to sync up with anyone interested in using Puppet to deploy Hadoop clusters. As you might recall, Adobe released modules on the Forge to deploy Hadoop.

If you’re interested in meeting up send us a note and we’ll schedule a time to talk.

For anyone interested, Hadoop world hosts around 1,400 professionals from Facebook, VMware, and Dell. The theme this year is “Hadoop for the Data Driven Enterprise” and will feature talks on that topic from companies like Etsy and Linkedin.

Related Content:

• siliconANGLE: Puppet and Hadoop among the hottest IT skills