OpenStack Summit lands up in Portland next week, and we’re jazzed to meet more people from the open-cloud community. If you’re coming out for the Summit, we’d love to welcome you to our fun space, have drinks and get to know you better.

So without further ado, here are our recommended activities for OpenStack folks:

Tuesday April 16, 8:30–10:00 – Puppet Labs Party
Get a warm welcome to Portland in our new office space, just a short streetcar ride from the Convention Center. We’ll be offering local beer, specialty cocktails, tasty snacks, a raffle for great prizes, and viewings of all 19 Muppet murals.

Sign up to guarantee your spot. We’ll see you at 926 NW 13th, Portland 97209. We’re on the second floor, suite 210. (You can also enter the building at 905 NW 12th.)

Monday April 15, 4:30–5:10 – Standup HA OpenStack with open Puppet manifests in under 20 minutes… for goat with Boris Renski of Mirantis
A great talk that should set you up for all you need to know to get started with Puppet and OpenStack. Pairs well with…

Wednesday April 17, 1:40–1:55 – Live demonstration at the Demo Theatre
Dan shows off the latest in Puppet and OpenStack integration.

Thursday April 18, 9:00–10:30 – Get started deploying OpenStack with Puppet with Dan Bode of Puppet Labs
Our own Dan Bode leads this workshop covering the architectural details of Puppet modules used for installation of OpenStack. He’ll show you how to get up and going quickly and easily. Don’t forget to bring your laptop with VirtualBox, Vagrant, and Git already installed.

Tuesday April 16, 1:50–2:30 – DevOps Panel
Get your DevOps on! Dan Bode moderates a panel of DevOps superstars: Mike Cohen, director of strategic alliances at Big Switch Networks; Kevin Jackson, senior solutions architect at Rackspace; James Penick, principal systems architect, Yahoo!; and Travis Tripp, systems architect at HP. Don’t miss out on this lively discussion.

Visit with the Puppeteers

Even if you can’t make our sure-to-be-raucous party, please stop by our table, pick up some swag, and quiz us on how Puppet and OpenStack work together. We’ll enjoy meeting you!

Learn more:

• Join the Puppet Labs party on Tuesday night
• Read a tutorial on getting started with Puppet and OpenStack
• Get the latest modules from StackForge
• Join the Puppet-OpenStack mailing list

Planning to attend AWS Summit in New York City on April 18? We’d love to have you drop by our booth – #512 – and chat with James Turnbull, Ben Reich and Alanna Brown. They’ll all be hanging out, and happy to gift you with a shirt or sticker.

We’re looking forward to some interesting sessions at AWS NYC, not least:

• Continuous deployment practices for companies running production, test and development environments on AWS, led by three AWS folks: Chris Munns, solutions architect; Chris Barclay, senior product manager; and Mike Limcaco, enterprise solutions architect.

• Building web scale applications with AWS using architectural patterns that support scalable, highly available services – applications that are low cost, low latency and friendly to Agile development. This session will be led by Don Cuddeford, AWS enterprise solutions architect, and Matt Trescot, solutions architect.

• What to consider when creating a hybrid IT model that includes AWS. Brian Adler, senior services architect at RightScale, will cover the concepts around cloud-enabling of your existing infrastructure, review the reference architecture for hybrid cloud, and review technological considerations by use case and technologies available to manage your hybrid IT infrastructure.

• Using Amazon CloudFront to architect your entire site for delivering both static and dynamic content. Alex Dunlap, senior manager at CloudFront, will talk about how to configure multiple origin servers, and more.

While you’re cruising around the expo space at Javits Center, make sure you visit our partners and friends:

Boundary at Booth #314
Citrix at #501
Cloudability at #412. This company is also a Portland neighbor, with offices just a short bike ride from ours.
Enstratius at #313
Eucalyptus at #312
Momentum SI at #507
RightScale at #201
 
Not able to attend AWS NYC this time? You can register for the livestream of the keynote by Amazon CTO Dr. William Vogels.

Watch for #awssummit tweets – you might pick up a few things from sessions you don’t get a chance to attend. And you can always catch our attention by including #puppetize  in your conversations ;-)

Learn more about how Puppet helps you provision, configure, and manage your public cloud infrastructure:

Provisioning with Amazon Web Services
Automating and Managing EC2 services with Puppet

We’ve heard a lot about the Obama campaign’s use of data and technology, particularly demographic data and the cloud. But in terms of DevOps and release management best practices, the campaign’s path was not an unusual one. When trying to get DevOps right, you have to solve the same problems over and over again, and if you don’t solve the biggest one – educating the owner on the iterative nature of DevOps – you’ve got a problem.

In the SD News article, “DevOps were the difference on the campaign trail,” Alex Handy describes the Obama team’s experience. When pushing out software releases, the tech team collapsed the boundary between engineering and operations. However, there was a learning curve. The non-technical staffers on the campaign were from the political arena, but none of the technical staff were. The campaigners were used to working in a burst every four years, and their approach was resistant to change. Iterative deployment was highly foreign to them. The campaigners expected to throw specs over the fence, get a product in three months, and yell at a vendor for getting it wrong. That’s not how Obama for America’s tech team worked. Instead there were wireframes and daily interactions between engineers, operations and the field team. This resulted in numerous clashes during the first summer of the campaign in 2011, which came to be known as “The Summer of Messing Up.”

It took a while for the stressed-out campaign staff to understand that “messing up” is DevOps for “failing forward,” especially as the team was building everything from scratch, saving virtually nothing of the 2008 campaign’s technology. In due time, the team coalesced, and intensely planned around single points of failure and scalability choke points, which came into play as the campaign’s apps took up 60 percent of Amazon’s medium instances in the eastern US.

The technology of release management was straightforward (the team used Puppet), but release management best practices are another thing. Though the campaign was extraordinary in many ways, these challenges are familiar to anyone who has made DevOps work. The battles are not unpredictable, but overcoming them is still a challenge.

Learn More

• Gene Kim’s Why We Need DevOps Now
• Mitch Hashimoto’s Stronger DevOps Culture with Vagrant and Puppet
• VIDEO: Razor = DevOps + Bare-metal Provisioning

• IT Automation: 5 Ways To Hit The ‘Ugly’ Stuff First (ReadWrite Enterprise). @IPSoft’s Jonathan Crane hits on some oldies but goodies for automating IT support, including diagnostics and password management.
• Virsto: Software Defined Data Center: Tip of the Iceberg (The Virtualization Practice). Edward Haletky opines on how VMware’s acquisition of Virsto advances VMware’s SDDC platform.
• Building a Test Puppet Master With Vagrant (Graham Gilbert). How can you effectively test configurations before pushing to production? Graham Gilbert shows you how using Vagrant.
• Sysadmins, what is the worst decision you ever made during production hours? (/r/sysadmin). Awesome moments include deleting the wrong SAN volume and mistakenly taking down the entire VMware environment.

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• Top Tools for Every System Administrator’s Toolbox (Pinehead.TV). ‘top’ tops the list.
• Q&A: LOPSA President Philip Kizer on why you should care about LOPSA (Spiceworks). Interview ranges from What is LOPSA? to IT education to … zombies. Tip o’ the hat to /r/sysadmin.
• Sorry, Geeks, Microsoft Excel is Everywhere (David Michael Ross). The $6 billion trading loss at JP Morgan last year had a number of contributing factors, including a “model operated through a series of Excel spreadsheets, which had to be completed manually, by a process of copying and pasting data from one spreadsheet to another.”
• DevOps – A Valentine’s Day Fairy Tale (Stackify). Never before had the two people found another person who so perfectly complemented them. Will you accept their forbidden love?

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While taking a snapshot of the current state of DevOps, in his CM Crossroads article “Behaviorally Speaking – 2013 Predictions for DevOps and IT Operations,” Bob Aiello points out the key reason that DevOps works: The practice forces a conscious design process for the operations phase of an application, something that often is not done with enough information. Aiello points out the specific tasks that are improved because of DevOps thinking.

Before doing this, he takes a moment to stand in awe of the most spectacular IT failure of 2012: the collapse of Knight Capital Group due to using the wrong version of networking software for New York Stock Exchange trading, resulting in an accidental purchase of more than $7 billion in stock and a loss of $440 million. Aiello uses this as a clarion call for mainstreaming DevOps.

As this occurs, the emphasis of some teams will need to change. If anything, there has been too much focus on “Dev” and not enough on “Ops,” Aiello says. Much time and effort is expended on development without apportioning sufficient resources to operations.

“DevOps puts the proper focus on improved communication and knowledge sharing that can help address the lag in productive interactions. The trick is to push the automation of application build, package, and deployment upstream so that you start by automating the work early in the application lifecycle,” he writes. If the work is automated from the start of the chain, and if the deployment framework is also automated, release management becomes an equally important player.

In 2013, tough challenges will be met through intense collaboration between development, operations, quality assurance and data security teams. This collaboration will be assisted by “excellent DevOps tools; tools vendors are stepping up to play a leadership role in recognizing and addressing the key challenges that are being faced across the industry.”

Together, better tools and better collaboration will win the day and avert the avoidable meltdowns we’ve seen in the past. Here’s to both!

Learn More

• Gene Kim’s Why We Need DevOps Now
• Mitch Hashimoto’s Stronger DevOps Culture with Vagrant and Puppet
• VIDEO: Razor = DevOps + Bare-metal Provisioning

• Re-using Puppet Configs Between Vagrant and ‘Real’ Systems (Github.com/blalor). Brian Lalor provides a simple example of how to set-up and reuse Puppet configs between Vagrant and “real” systems.
• How I make interesting technical presentations (Lindsay Holmwood). Lindsay’s tips can help mitigate premature death-by-PowerPoint of your audience.
• State of the Union: LOPSA Quick Poll (lopsa.org). LOPSA’s January ‘quick poll’ asks about sysadmins’ education and training backgrounds.
• Book Review: The Phoenix Project (the agile admin). ernestm gives two thumbs up to Gene Kim’s latest book, “The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win.”

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• Approaches to Application Release Automation (DevOps.com). Nolio’s Phil Cherry provides a nice overview of process-based, packaged-based, declarative, imperative, and generic approaches to application release automation (ARA).
• Employment survey says IT job satisfaction is all about the work (SearchDataCenter). Stephen Bigelow suggests that it’s not the cash, it’s the challenge of the job that keeps highly-skilled IT folks engaged.
• DevOps in the Cloud: How IT Can Eliminate Google Envy (Wired.com). Jason Liu argues that by adopting DevOps enterprise IT can achieve agility similar to that of Facebook, Google, Netflix, and other web companies.
• How much is an IaaS VM worth? (TechRepublic). John Joyner breaks-down apples-to-apples comparison of Amazon Web Services and on-premise virtualization costs.

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LISA holds a special place in Puppet Labs lore. Our CEO, Luke Kanies, has described LISA as the place where many of his ideas for Puppet were formed. Heated hallway discussions and frustration over the state of existing configuration management tools shaped the declarative, model-based foundation of Puppet. We’ve come a long way since then, but one thing remains constant: there’s no better time than the present to make the future of IT better.

LISA 2012 kicks off this week and we’ll be there to answer all of your IT automation questions.

• Stop by booth #201 – Jose Palafox will be handing out Puppet Labs t-shirts so stop by and say hello.
• Wednesday, Dec. 12 – Join us from 7:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m. for a Puppet Labs Birds-of-a-Feather session with open Q&A. Go ahead. Ask us anything.
• Friday, Dec. 14 – Professional Services Engineer, Nathan Valentine, will give a one-day Introduction to Puppet training, covering basic Puppet concepts, Live Management, modules, classes, and more. Can’t make it? We offer an in-depth 3-day course all over the world.
• Friday, Dec. 14 – From 11:15 a.m – 12:15 p.m., check out Kelsey Hightower’s Build a Cloud Day talk “Automatic Configuration of Your Cloud with Puppet”.

We hope to see you at LISA 2012!

• How to Stop Running the Project Gauntlet of Doom with DevOps (Ulitzer). Lori MacVittie describes how through a combination of automation and environment standardization Red Hat dramatically reduced its release cycle times.
• Well, this is embarrassing… (Standalone Sysadmin). @StandaloneSA makes a courageous admission – he’s been configuring Apache web servers incorrectly for the last 15 years. Read on about the nuances of VirtualHost.
• How IT will be blown to bits (InfoWorld). Winding up the year on a bang, Eric Knorr asserts that emerging vertical or industry PaaS solutions will chip away at the authority of centralized IT.
• Differences between enterprise data centers and public cloud (TechTarget). Alex Barrett highlights the technological, architectural, and even philosophical differences between public clouds and enterprise data centers.

Learn More

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• Sign-up for our monthly newsletter.