The actions of IT Operations teams influence the efficiency, availability, cost of delivery, and customer satisfaction of the services your organization is delivering to your customers. This means getting IT right, particularly IT Operations, has become a crucial part of doing business in the modern market. IT Operations managers face three major challenges—finding the right people, building the right culture, and creating the right processes. This won’t be a surprise to most managers, as they are the building blocks of any good team or organization. But IT has often lagged behind in tackling these challenges.

Of all of these challenges, finding the right IT Operations people has perhaps become the most serious and potentially has the most impact on improving your operations. The methods and incentives for recruitment have changed. Premium candidates expect challenging workplaces, cutting edge technology, excellent benefits, and a competitive salary.

The best candidates also expect companies to provide environments where they can share their skills and ideas with the wider Operations community. This includes allowing them to contribute to open source projects, publishing tools and code, and engaging with the community through social media and technical channels.

By opening up the way you work both internally and externally, companies can begin attracting the right candidates. Internally, look at the ideas fomenting around the DevOps community about communication and collaboration. Externally, publish your successes. Publish your Puppet modules. Look at the tools you develop internally and identify those that you think others might be interested in and open source them. Publish them on places like GitHub.

Follow this up with getting your staff to talk, blog, and present about the tools and techniques they use and most importantly about the difference it makes to how you run your infrastructure. Once you start to treat and view your IT Operations team as ambassadors for your organization in the broader Operations community, you’ll find that their success is reflected in a greater ability to hire.

There is a place where you can meet Operations rock stars and parade your organization’s virtues. That place is the upcoming PuppetConf event being held over September 22nd and 23rd in Portland, Oregon. Send your IT Operations staff, let them share ideas and meet a thriving community and demonstrate that you’re working towards creating a business that employs IT Operations rock stars. It’s more than just Puppet of course, it’s an Operations conference with DevOps, Cloud and Puppet tracks and will be attended by some of the smartest people in Operations and technology. Register today and save 10% using discount code cultureshift.

Cross-posted from the PuppetConf blog.

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.

Basics

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.

Teaching Philosophy

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.

Cost & Take Away

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:

In our continued efforts to help you get the most out of Puppet, our professional services team is working on bite-sized content in the form of Puppetcasts. Here are two casts created by Dan Bode.

New Features for Puppet Dashboard

This cast covers the inventory service query, 2.6 reports, and reports for catalog compilation failures.

Inventory Service Support for Multiple Puppet Masters

Add a comment or send a message about any topics you want to see covered in the future editions.