• A Mature Role for Automation: Part I (@allspaw). Long and thoughtful piece by Etsy’s John Allspaw. Put your feet up and crack open a cold one.
• Why admins should know how to code (InfoWorld). While you don’t need a PhD in CompSci, @pvenezia shares how scripting chops saved his bacon.
• DevOps Protocol: No Manual Changes (Agile Web). “Let’s discuss why messing with production systems is bad and what to do about it.” Indeed.
• DreamWorks Data Center: Where Creativity and IT Efficiency Coexist (eWeek). Slides tease glimpses of the 4PB of film data and 17,000 cores for hits like “Shrek,” “Kung Fu Panda,” and “Wallace & Gromit.”

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• Which Freaking PaaS Should I Use? (InfoWorld). Hands-on eval of seven major PaaS offerings. Spoiler: CloudBees and VMware CloudFoundry do pretty well.
• The Ops Benefit of the Cloud (Mozilla IT). “The ops benefit of the cloud is NOT ‘less ops.’”.
• Outage Prevention: Taking Humans Out Of The IT Equation (Forbes CIO Network). “51% of network outages were caused by human error.” This piece argues that Skynet is the answer. Hmm….
• Getting Started With Puppet Enterprise (@bbooysen). Ben provides a very nice step-by-step (with screenshots!) walkthrough of the install and set-up of PE 2.6.1 for managing two servers, all on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

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• Software-Defined Networks (Linux Magazine). Yep, you’ve been ignoring that ‘CCNA for Dummies’ book long enough. SDNs starting to blur the lines between the roles of sysadmins and neteng.
• The value of Open Development (Seeing the fnords). Nice piece by OpenStack release manager Thierry Carnez. Teaser: “Open Development allows you to ‘release early, release often’ and get the testing, QA, feedback of (all) your users.” Word.
• Book: DevOps for Developers (Oracle). Early stocking-stuffer for your developer buddies.
• The Cloud (xkcd). Because it’s hump day. ’nuff said.

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• Believe It or Not, DevOps and Infosec Are a Perfect Culture Match (Infosec Island). Gene Kim explores the challenges at the intersection of security, development, and operations.
• Cisco WebEx’s OpenStack Case Study (OpenStack.org). At the OpenStack Summit last week, Reinhardt Quelle, Operations Architect at Cisco WebEx, discussed their OpenStack deployment which uses Puppet to provision compute and storage services.
• Puppet, DevOps and Big Data (vdatacloud.com). VMware’s Dan Hushon, Chief Technologist, Cloud Information Platforms at EMC, reflects on “the transitive uses of the DevOps models in new domains.”
• Puppet Types and Providers (Amazon). Our very own engineers, Dan Bode and Nan Liu, have a new book in the works and it’s available for pre-order on Amazon.

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• Dice: DevOps Is A Growing Trend (PCWorld). We missed this one in the run-up to PuppetConf: “The role [of the sysadmin] is evolving to become more strategic and less task-based as servers migrate to the cloud.”
• Software-Defined Datacenters, Clouds, & PuppetConf 2012 (VMware). VMware’s Paul Strong, CTO for Global Field & Customer Initiatives, reflects on the past, present, and future of virtualized resources and IT automation.
• Don’t Be Your Virtual Environment’s Plaything (Spiceworks). Robbie Wright warns that you won’t get the most out of virtualization without virtualization management.
• Advanced Vagrant Usage with Puppet (YouTube). Mitch “I’m an automation freak” Hashimoto, author of Vagrant, a powerful tool for creating and configuring portable development environments, serves up a buffet of how-tos, power-ups, and tips in this PuppetConf 2012 talk.

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A long time ago (well, June of this year) the Puppet Forge was running without a leader. In my role as community manager, I saw the Forge as having this awesome potential to be the resource for user-generated content surrounding the Puppet community. I knew it was getting more attention, but that was mostly anecdotal. My next step was to find some data that could tell a good story.

Puppet Modules are often the first way people learn and start using Puppet. We’ve had our Puppet Forge for a while, but I didn’t feel like I knew a lot about it. When we were getting ready to interview Product Owners for the Puppet Forge and Modules, I decided I wanted to know more to help me prepare for the interview, and maybe give me some insight into usage patterns that I hadn’t thought about.

Like any geek, I love data. I knew we had all sorts of data in our module download logs, but we had not ever really taken the time to transform that data into awesome information. I started with simple awk/sed/grep to find basic information, like what modules were popular. This worked for a time, but then I wanted to know modules by name, find popular authors, and do things like ignore version number changes.

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Some of you may have noticed a new page in the community section of the website devoted to Puppet Community Metrics. These metrics are the ones that Michael Stahnke has been presenting at various conferences and Puppet Camps over the past year, so they might look familiar. The difference now is that I will be gathering our community metrics for each calendar month and posting them to the Puppet Community Metrics page. Now you’ll be able to see what is happening in the Puppet community on a regular basis, rather than waiting for the next event.

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Following the release of Puppet 3.0, the Puppet 3 Reference Manual is now live, and several other documents have been updated. Here are some of the highlights:

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I’m Dawn Foster, and I’m really excited to have joined Puppet Labs on September 27th as the new Community Manager.

Here is a little background to help you understand why I’m crazy enough to want to be an open source community manager. I’ve been working with open source communities mostly full-time for the past 12 years, and I’ve been using open source software since the early ’90s.

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We’re excited to be at the OpenStack Summit in San Diego next week. Dan Bode and Teyo Tyree will be hanging out at Cisco’s booth, ready to talk Puppet, OpenStack, community, and anything else you might want to have a conversation about. Dan will also be taking part in a number of scheduled talks:

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