PuppetCamp SF is in the books. We had a great day of presentations and community at the Google campus, covering everything from cloud automation to running Puppet at scale.

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We spent several days in Austin last week attending Puppet Camp Austin and DevOpsDays. A big thank you to MomentumSI and Geek Austin for sponsoring Puppet Camp, and thanks to the crew at DevOpsDays for a great event!

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We go to a lot of events. No, really, we go to a lot of events, and take it from us, DevOpsDays is one of the very best. It’s a chance to share and learn about making systems that run smoother, faster and more intelligently – and improve our lives, too.

This year, we’re sponsoring DevOpsDays Austin, held April 30 and May 1 at The Marchesa. Both days are filled with sessions you’re sure to find valuable.  A couple of highlights:

May 1, 9:15 AM: Patrick DeBois, organizer of DevOpsDays, will talk about the future of DevOps. Hint of what’s to come in this tweet.

May 1, 9:35 AM: Gene Kim, champion of DevOps and assiduous studier of high-performing IT organizations, offers his perspective on “How Do We Better Sell DevOps?”

Come visit us at our sponsor table, where we’ll have plenty on hand for you. Pick up a copy of our 2013 State of DevOps Report - you’ll find all kinds of interesting facts about how DevOps practices make organizations more efficient. Ask us for a Puppet Enterprise demo. Don one of our famous t-shirts. Or just hang out and chat about all things DevOps and Puppet.

Speaking of Puppet, we’re holding an entire day of Puppet content at PuppetCamp Austin on April 29, right before DevOpsDays. We invite you to register.

I always have a great time at our Puppet Camps, but I had an especially nice time at Puppet Camp Amsterdam. It was held in an old, renovated church situated right on the canals called De Rode Hoed (“The Red Hat”). While we didn’t make people present from the pulpit or play the old pipe organ, both provided a pretty cool backdrop for the stage. Take a look, then read more:

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Last week, we had a sold-out Puppet Camp London at the lovely and historic Somerset House. A huge thank you to Quru, our partner in the region, for helping us organize the event and to Red Hat for sponsoring and doing a bunch of demos.

Luke Kanies, Puppet Labs founder and CEO, kicked off the day with the State of Puppet presentation where he talked about the current state of IT, DevOps, and how Puppet fits into the picture. It was great having Luke at Puppet Camp for the keynote and during the rest of the day. Judging by how often people were cornering him to talk about Puppet, I think everyone enjoyed having him there!

Creating great modules is one of the most important tasks for anyone using Puppet, and we had a whole presentation devoted to building reusable modules from Jon Topper at Scale Factory. He talked about what they have learned over years of building modules for their clients, and ways to make your modules more reusable and easier to work with.

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We had a great response to Puppet Camp Barcelona with over 170 attendees in person and 12 more watching the internal live stream from the Telefónica offices in Madrid and Granada. A huge thank you to Telefónica for generously providing their space for us!

We kicked off the day with Chris Spence delivering the State of Puppet presentation to give attendees a good overview of Puppet and related technologies along with more information about Puppet Labs and our community. He not only kicked off the event, but he also wrapped up the day with some Puppet demos.

Gary Wilson also did two presentations, and he should win some kind of award for creative presentation style. He talked about Good Things to Know about Puppet and ZPF – The Elusive Zero Point of Failure with poetry and examples from science. He did all of this with a presentation driven by command line scripts that ran live code to build things as he described them.

One of my favorite talks of the day was about Test driven Infrastructure Development from Tomas Doran (aka bobtfish). I was a little worried during the first half of the presentation where he talked mostly about what didn’t work, but luckily, he shifted to how to make things better about halfway through the talk. If you haven’t seen him present, I highly recommend watching him for the entertainment value alone.

Alex Soto did a quick poll before he started his presentation to ask if people wanted to hear his talk about Mimicking Your Java EE Production Environment for Testing and Beyond in Spanish or English, and the overwhelming response was for him to present in Spanish. He talked about continuous delivery and releasing more often, building a pipeline, virtualization tools and how all of this (and more) works with Puppet.

Xavi Carrillo did a great talk about how Telefónica R&D uses Puppet in combination with Gitlab to configure their systems and keep everything in a controlled state to make deployments much easier. Right now, all of this work is being done in testing environments before they puppetize their production environment. Francisco Martínez from Telefónica also did a short Hiera 101 demo to demonstrate what you can do with Heira. I always like hearing presentations from people who are are still in the early stages of their work with Puppet, since a lot of people are in similar situations and can relate to these types of talks.

Like most tech events, we ended with drinks after the Puppet Camp presentations, and quite a few of us stayed for several hours. I really enjoy these social activities where we can chat about what we learned and wind down from a full day of activities.

Thank you to everyone who joined us at Puppet Camp Barcelona! If you missed it, you can get links to the presentations for this event shortly or view materials from other past Puppet Camps by visiting the Previous Puppet Camps section of the Puppet Camp page.

Learn more:

• We have Puppet Camps coming up in London, Amsterdam, San Francisco, Nuremberg, New York, Raleigh and more. Visit the Puppet Camp page to register to attend or learn more about submitting talks.
• Attend PuppetConf, our annual operations conference at the Fairmont in San Francisco on August 22 and 23. You can register now or submit a session proposal!
• Find a local Puppet User Group or start one in your city!
• Download the Learning Puppet VM, and get started learning Puppet in a safe environment following our introductory tutorial.
• Already using Puppet, and have questions? Visit our community Ask site, and get answers and advice on how to take Puppet further.
• Join the Puppet community.

Can you believe we’re almost a quarter through the year? We’ve already had quite a few Puppet Camps in 2013, but we have a few more on the schedule before we take a break for the summer and get ready for PuppetConf on August 22 – 23!

Before we take a hiatus from Puppet Camps, we’ve lined up some additional Puppet Camps for the next couple of months and we need your help! We’re looking for speakers to provide talks on Puppet technologies, as well as talks on how you use Puppet in your organization and what you’ve learned from doing so. Because most Puppet Camps bring in 100 – 200 people, the events are also a great way to test out a presentation that you are thinking of doing about Puppet at a larger conference (hint: perhaps you’re planning to submit a speaker proposal for PuppetConf later this year).

Speaker slots are still available for the following Puppet Camps:

Puppet Camp San Francisco, April 9:
Register here, and/or click here to submit a talk before March 17.

Puppet Camp Nuremberg, April 19:
Register or submit a talk before March 15. More details here.

Puppet Camp New York City, April 24:
Register here and/or click here to submit a talk before March 24:

Puppet Camp Austin, scheduled for April 29 (before DevOpsDays):
Register here and/or click here to submit a talk before April 12.

Puppet Camp Raleigh, NC (Research Triangle), May 16:
Register here and/or click here to submit a talk before April 15.

Puppet Camp tickets are still available:

We’ve got a few upcoming Puppet Camps for which presentations have been selected and agenda has been set, but we’ve still have room for additional attendees. Just make sure you secure your seats now, because they will sell out!

• Barcelona, March 14: http://puppetcampbarcelona2013.eventbrite.com
• Baltimore, March 15: http://puppetcampbaltimore2013.eventbrite.com
• Atlanta, March 19: http://puppetcampatlanta2013.eventbrite.com
• Amsterdam, April 5: http://puppetcampamsterdam2013.eventbrite.com

Puppet Camp Chicago and Puppet Camp London both rock; both events are sold out, but you can still get on the waitlist:

• Puppet Camp Chicago, March 13
• Puppet Camp London, March 27

As always, let me know if you have any questions, and I hope to see some of you at these upcoming Puppet Camps!

Learn More

• If you missed some of our recent Puppet Camps, you can catch up by reading the presentation materials (and watch videos where available) here.
• Check out recaps from last month’s Puppet Camps:
  • Puppet Camp Ghent
  • Puppet Camp LA
  • Puppet Camp Stockholm
  • Puppet Camp Oslo

On February 13th I had the pleasure of taking part in another Puppet Camp, this time in Oslo. Thanks to Redpill-Linpro for co-organizing and hosting the event!

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Puppet Camp LA this year was an unforgettable event! We planned it in conjunction with SCALE 11x, the The Eleventh Annual Southern California Linux Expo. Puppet Camp LA ran all day Friday, and various companies and communities held all-day tracks in other rooms. Saturday and Sunday comprised SCALE 11x, which was an excellent conference, thanks in no small part to the dedicated and energetic volunteers behind it.

We had seats at Puppet Camp LA for about 80 people, but the room was consistently packed to overflowing, with over 100 people watching in person, others viewing the livestream, and many more unable to fit inside. For anyone who missed the talks: good news, we’ve got slides!

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The recent Puppet Camp Melbourne was yet another great Puppet Camp. Lots of thanks to Ian Orszaczki and the Sensis team, as well as ICE systems, New Relic, and Telstra for helping make this event an astounding success. We had about 180 folks in attendance at the camp.

I kicked things off with another Puppet Labs state of the union talk, which Stephen Wallace from ICE then followed with a beginners talk that covered the motivation for using Puppet and provided an overview of the tooling in its ecosystem. You can check out his slides on “Puppet for Sysadmins”.

Stephen Johnson followed with a fond and appropriately titled Love/Hate Puppet that covered many language inconsistencies and other gotchas with Puppet. Next, David Lutz shook things up with an excellent presentation that walked through lots of cultural hacks that lead to more productive companies.

Following that was “Puppet for Build, Test, and Release Environment Integrity”, a presentation by Rene Medilin that discussed tooling required to implement continuous delivery solutions. It featured all of the usual suspects like Puppet, Vagrant, and Virtualbox, with special mentions to ScriptRock and Cucumber.

Barry Ramirez gave an interesting talk on “A Service Owner’s Answer to Customer Complexity” and Andrew Myers provided a presentation on NBN’s usage of MCollective that focused on security and use cases.The final slot of the camp was taken as an experts panel. After that, we ran off to a local bar. ;-)

Thank you to everyone who attended or participated in the event! If you missed it, you can get links to the presentations for this event or materials from other past Puppet Camps by visiting the Previous Puppet Camps section of the Puppet Camp page.

Learn more:

• We have Puppet Camps coming up in Chicago, Barcelona, Atlanta, Baltimore, London and Amsterdam. Visit the Puppet Camp page to register to attend or learn more about submitting talks.
• Attend PuppetConf, our annual operations conference held in San Francisco. Registration is now open.
• Find a local Puppet User Group or start one in your city!
• Join the Puppet community.