Puppet Labs

Dear Boss: You Really Need To Send Me to PuppetConf

2013-06-17T21:59:47Z

You know you want to go to PuppetConf in San Francisco this year. It’s a chance to hear the leading minds in IT today talk about cloud automation, continuous delivery, DevOps, and how to use Puppet Labs technologies to make your life easier. Plus you get the chance to meet and talk with the people behind the the technology, and get hands-on training from experts in the areas you most want to learn. Plus, it’s San Francisco.

If your boss hurries, he can approve your trip in time for your company to save 25 percent off the full price.

Here’s a letter you can copy and paste and send to your boss, just because we’re helpful like that. We’ll look forward to seeing you August 22-23 in San Francisco.

Subject Line: Why [your company] should send me to PuppetConf 2013

Dear [boss' name],

Automating IT has become critical to business strategy. For [your company] to stay competitive, we need to continually educate ourselves on the newest IT innovations that boost productivity and keep companies agile.

PuppetConf is the one can’t-miss annual conference for the IT industry, and it’s taking place August 22-23 in San Francisco. The best minds in IT will be meeting at PuppetConf 2013 to discuss leading-edge thinking in DevOps, cloud automation and continuous delivery. By attending, I’ll have access to:

Educational sessions and hands-on experience. With two full days of keynotes, presentations and hands-on labs, I’ll learn how IT professionals are using Puppet Labs technologies to deliver business results faster, with higher quality and greater efficiency.

Product research and analysis. The tradeshow will give me access to 40-plus sponsors – a great opportunity to see what’s available in the rapidly changing IT marketplace. I’ll be able to choose from more than 70 sessions led by IT experts on new tools, methods and strategies that can help our company gain a competitive advantage.

Networking with industry experts. More than 1,600 sysadmins, architects, engineers, developers and IT managers will convene at PuppetConf. Informal, lively discussions between these professionals offer excellent opportunities to learn how smart people are solving difficult IT problems. More than 120 Puppet Labs employees will also be on hand to answer questions and offer insight into future product developments.

Official training and education courses. Puppet Labs offers a wide selection of training and education courses both before and after the conference. Registration for each course includes a free ticket to PuppetConf. Developer Day, a free one-day event for all attendees, offers the opportunity to meet community developers and work on my choice of open source projects, documentation, Puppet Forge modules and more — with expert help and advice right there on tap.

Costs for attending PuppetConf:
Early Bird Registration (by July 17): $750, discounted from $995
Hotel: $239 per night (plus taxes) at the conference hotel, The Fairmont San Francisco Hotel. This represents a special discounted rate available through July 16th.
Meals: Most meals are included with my conference ticket.
Airfare: $_____

With all that I can learn and bring back to [your company], PuppetConf is a worthwhile investment that will deliver solid returns for our business. You can learn more about PuppetConf and the benefits it offers here.

Thanks for taking the time to consider my request,

[your name]

Dustin Mitchell from Mozilla Is Our Second Featured Community Member

2013-06-17T21:33:46Z

Dustin has long been a fighter for the Light Side of the Force in the Puppet community, but with the last release of Puppet, his contributions moved to some serious next-level goodness.

After finishing hack sessions at PyCon, he spent a few days with us in the Puppet Labs offices. He showed up Friday morning and after getting Wi-Fi access he immediately dove in to one of the thorniest areas in Puppet—SSL certificates—which had been causing Mozilla major pain.

In just a couple of days, he and Jeff McCune had bashed through multiple bugs spanning three years of weird edge cases and added great support for using external certificate authorities. The fruits of their labor shipped in Puppet 3.2, and should benefit not only Mozilla but everyone who’s trying to integrate Puppet with an existing SSL infrastructure. Kudos to Dustin for this valuable work, and many thanks to Mozilla for sponsoring it.

You can check out Dustin’s great work on GitHub, chat with him on IRC as djmitche, or follow him on Google+. The Puppet project he works on is entirely open—not just the modules, but everything. Check it out at https://wiki.mozilla.org/ReleaseEngineering/PuppetAgain. We’re pleased to acknowledge him as our second Featured Community Member!

Learn more

Listen to a podcast on Puppet at Mozilla
Explore the Puppet Community
Participate on our new Q+A site, ask.puppetlabs.com

Melbourne – Puppet Advanced Training

2013-06-17T16:35:17Z

Pricing

$2,395 by September 2, 2013; $2,595 on or after September 3, 2013.

Puppet Community Metrics: May 2013

2013-06-14T19:54:35Z

The monthly Puppet community metrics report from May is now ready to satisfy your curiosity about Puppet community growth. Here is a quick summary of the May 2013 edition of the metrics for your reading pleasure, and you can also download the full May Puppet metrics report (PDF link) for your monthly dose of data.

May 2013 Metrics Summary

5871 members and 861 messages in Puppet-Users
1050 members and 112 messages in Puppet-Dev
999 nicks on #puppet IRC channel
2638 Puppet Forge accounts and 1171 modules
4283 Redmine accounts
570 forks /1312 watchers of Puppet
309 Ask questions, 1466 posts, 453 members

Six Month Comparison (December 2012)

5131 members and 886 messages in Puppet-Users
941 members and 108 messages in Puppet-Dev
893 nicks on #puppet IRC channel
1942 Puppet Forge accounts and 726 modules
3728 Redmine accounts
444 Forks / 1082 watchers of Puppet

The Ask Puppet Labs site, where you can post and answer Puppet-related questions, has continued to grow. Congrats to the top participants so far…

Can you rocket yourself into the top tier by sharing puppet knowledge in June? It’s likely! The Ask Site awaits.

Top 5 participants (by number of messages / replies posted) in the Puppet-Users list:

jcbollinger
Ygor
David Schmitt
Martin Langhoff
Ken Barber

Here are the top 5 participants (by number of messages / replies posted) in the Puppet-Dev list:

Andy Parker
Matthaus Litteken
Jeff McCune
Allan Yung
Dustin Mitchell

You can see the full report for the top 10 participants in the Puppet-Users, Puppet-Dev, Puppet-Razor and MCollective mailing lists.

Top 5 participants (by number of lines posted) in the #Puppet IRC channel:

ashp
_rc
finch
FriedBob
ken_barber

You can see the list of the top 20 people in the full report.

The full metrics report for May (PDF link) has charts and additional details if you want to see more.

Learn More

View more Puppet community metrics.
Ask Puppet Labs Question and Answer site.
Listen to a podcast on Community Contributions to Puppet.
Join the community in our Google Groups and more, #puppet on IRC, and #puppetize and @PuppetLabs on Twitter.
Stay up-to-date with the Puppet Labs newsletter.

Washington, DC Puppet Fundamentals Training

2013-06-14T16:25:53Z

Pricing

$2,195.00 by September 23, 2013; $2,395.00 on or after September 24, 2013

Melbourne – Puppet Fundamentals Training

2013-06-14T16:17:37Z

Pricing

$2,395 by August 28, 2013; $2,595 on or after August 29, 2013.

Come Talk to Us at Velocity & DevOpsDays

2013-06-14T08:34:20Z

It’s that time of year — we’re headed down to sunny California for Velocity Conf and DevOpsDays. Join us at Velocity this year for some can’t-miss culture talks and a rollicking good time at Booth #519.

Recommended Velocity Sessions

DevOps: It’s not just for WebOps and we have the metrics to prove it (Thursday, 1:15, Grand Ballroom ABCD): Gene Kim, Jez Humble, John Willis, and our own James Turnbull are giving this talk that covers the findings of our 2012 DevOps survey (based on responses from over 4,000 IT professionals). They’ll present demographics, psychographics, cultural beliefs, behaviors and performance of practitioners across the spectrum of DevOps adoption.

DevOps has moved beyond the bleeding edge, with 65 percent of our respondents having already implemented or currently implementing DevOps. This talk will go through the implications of these findings and identify practices that set high performers apart from the pack. They will share the common characteristics of high, medium and low performing organizations, the business value DevOps has brought to their organizations, and their demographics and psychographics.

Once upon a time: Why operations mythology matters (Thursday, 3:30 pm, Grand Ballroom ABCD): Join James Turnbull for a look at the role your ops mythology plays in your culture, and how to promote the stories that help your organization (and break the cycle of tales that give your sysadmins nightmares). And yes, James is going to have an especially busy Thursday.

We’ll be hanging around Booth #519, excited to talk to anyone who’s excited to talk to us. (If you’ve been looking for a Puppet Labs t-shirt of your very own, then definitely swing by.)

DevOpsDays

After Velocity, we’ll be moving right along to DevOpsDays. You’re going to want to take part in this meeting of great minds. The program includes talks, open space sessions, and probably more tech jokes than you ever knew existed. If you can’t make it in person, BMC has sponsored a livestream that will be available during the event.

We look forward to seeing you in California next week!

Learn More

Check out the full Velocity Conference schedule
Learn more about our DevOps survey results on our DevOps solutions page & 2013 State of DevOps report
Register for DevOpsDays (or check out the livestream)
Don’t forget to add PuppetConf to your conference calendar

Continuous Integration Success Depends on Automation

2013-06-13T18:55:41Z

Continuous delivery — the ability to ship new and awesome features, updates and patches to your customers more frequently — is key to getting ahead of the competition, and staying there.

Getting to continuous delivery of quality code that actually works in production relies on continuous integration: a system for testing code incrementally and frequently.

Continuous integration is both a toolchain and a discipline. It’s less about the specific tooling, though, and more about the practice of continually integrating changes so the system can catch errors and failures while they’re still small and manageable. Your continuous integration system is what gives your team enough confidence in its code to ship frequently.

The continuous integration system is necessarily complex, spanning the development, test and staging environments. For the sysadmin, provisioning, configuring and maintaining these environments — and making sure they accurately reflect the production environment — can look like a Sisyphean task.

Automation is the key to cutting this task down to size. Just as automation makes server provisioning and patch management easier and more reliable, it can enable you to help your development team deliver code faster.

Automating Continuous Integration Reduces Risk

What scares people most about shipping code frequently is the risk of breaking things. And it’s a realistic fear: Most software is complex, often reaching into multiple parts of the organization. What looks like a small error at first can have far-reaching consequences.

Let’s look at each dimension of complexity:

Speed. Shipping fast scares people because it poses the risk of inadequate testing.
Lots of changes to lots of pieces. Every change brings with it the risk of breaking something, and frequent changes that affect multiple things bring even more risk.
Many people. Fast changes, and lots of them, are challenging enough with just one person or group involved. It gets even harder when multiple people are introducing changes, because every person has the opportunity to introduce error.

Continuous integration mitigates these risks by testing every new iteration of your code, instead of testing once a day, or once a week. That limits the damage that can be done if something breaks. Testing incrementally also makes it easier to identify and remediate errors.

Automation plays an important role here, by eliminating — or at least vastly reducing — the opportunity for people to cause errors.

With the risk threshold lowered, it becomes much easier to test frequently. Some organizations get to the point where they’re testing and deploying many times per day, resulting in cleaner code — and ultimately, faster release to customers.

IT Operations: Stage Manager for Continuous Integration

Every system and sub-system in the continuous integration flow has to be monitored and kept consistent over multiple testing cycles — consistent not only to itself, but to every other piece, and to the production environment.

Automation makes consistency much easier to achieve, and every piece of continuous integration can be automated:

Building the dev and test environments
Configuring each environment
Maintaining correct configuration for each environment
Remediating configuration drift
Scaling up as needed

With every piece automated, you’ve set the stage for testing code both incrementally and reliably. Sure, you might want to spot-check manually once in a while. But without automating the vast majority of your testing, it’s almost impossible to realize the full benefits of continuous integration.

Learn more

Matthew Barr of Snap Interactive talks about bringing continuous integration tools and practices to Puppet code to manage automation of your infrastructure in a safe, reliable manner.
How Puppet Labs leverages automated testing, continuous integration, continuous delivery and DevOps tools and practices to do effective testing with a small QA team.
Creating a deployment pipeline at Australia’s National Broadband Network, using continuous integration practices.

Build Bridges and Bust Silos with a Common Toolchain

2013-06-13T17:47:15Z

It was time for the small company I worked for to pick new content tools, and we were in a meeting to hear from the project lead.

She gave a great talk, explaining the benefits and tradeoffs of each tool. Her slides had cat pictures. She was funny and self-deprecating. But the Q&A afterward was tense. The underlying note of each comment was, “I don’t mind change as long as it’s happening to anybody else.”

Afterward, we joked about the meeting.

“It’s hard,” she said. “People like their tools, and you’ve got to tell them they might have to change something, and …”

“Nerd rage,” I finished for her.

“Right. Nerd rage.”

Technical folks, whether they’re sysadmins, front-enders or application developers, are deeply attached to their tools: It’s either tmux or screen, vim or Emacs, git or svn, rvm or rbenv.

Most of the time, those preferences are benign: Maybe you have to twist the sysadmin’s arm to get him to install Emacs alongside vim, or just settle on using tramp over ssh to sidestep the issue. Sometimes those preferences become damaging blockers as tooling becomes the focus of inter-departmental squabbles.

Our 2013 State of DevOps Report recommends learning a common toolchain to foster communication throughout an organization. When different teams and departments have common tools, they become more aligned and benefit from a bigger pool of experience. Instead of three siloed bug trackers containing three Rashomon-like versions of the same issue, you’ve got one. And that script they use over in engineering that adds a Trello card when someone files a bug in the tracker? Now everyone gets to use it.

Getting everyone on the same page is key to establishing DevOps culture. Our report shows the benefits of that culture grow over time: Your organization starts shipping code faster, with fewer errors. When errors do crop up, they’re resolved faster because you don’t have to pull stakeholders from multiple silos to work out a fix.

Leveraging Common Tools

When we looked at our survey data from the State of DevOps report, Git proved to be the ascendant version control system among all organizations, not just the ones that identified as DevOps shops. About two-thirds of our respondents reported using it, and version control tools in general figured prominently. That makes them ideal subjects to explore the ways the ops and development teams can come together: Version control is everywhere.

Puppet Labs operations lead Kelsey Hightower demonstrates the ways Git can help bridge the gap between the operations and developer teams in the video below. He shows how Puppet Enterprise can help facilitate that process by capturing the wisdom of a sysadmin with the Puppet DSL, a web developer’s code in Git, and then bringing the two together with its orchestration engine.

The tool Kelsey demos shows how an operations team can provide developers with self-service code deployments to different web environments.

Instead of handing over root or juggling permissions in specific directories, a sysadmin can use Puppet Enterprise to express the desired state of a given environment. Once she’s configured the server environment, she can write orchestration engine plugins that allow a developer to visit a web console, enter the Git SHA he’d like to deploy to staging or production, then push code out over multiple nodes at once.

Thanks to the guarantees of consistency and on-the-spot remediation offered by Puppet Enterprise, sysadmins can rest easy knowing basic operational and security concerns are handled. Thanks to their ability to push code on their own, without hand-holding or being forced to navigate an unfamiliar shell environment, developers know they can get their work into staging or production on their own timetable.

Better yet, developers can inspect the environments their code will be running on using the Puppet Enterprise console, which offers a frequently updated, single source of truth that provides complete reporting on the state of any node on the network. Working in unison with operations, developers can review custom facts that report on application versions and other key system data, helping them anticipate the environments their code will be running in before pushing it out.

The common thread throughout this process is a shared tool: Git. The ops team doesn’t need to master Git to write the simple code needed to leverage it for deployments, and the dev team is probably already using it. Kelsey’s orchestration plugin could also work with svn or any other automatable version control system. The only thing that’s really required is an agreement on the tool in question, and some communication between the developer and operations teams to make it work.

But don’t stop here. Once you’ve figured out one way to share tools and build better communications, it’s time to tackle bigger projects and build more bridges.

Learn More

Automation makes it easier to share tools by simplifying configuration and speeding deployment. Puppet Enterprise can help you with that. Download it now and try it out on 10 nodes for free.
Tools are just part of building DevOps culture. Learn more about the benefits of DevOps practices and culture.
Thanks to the Puppet Forge and reusable modules, Puppet Enterprise can be extended to talk to all sorts of version control tools. Take a look at the vcsrepo module, which enables you to work with Git, Subversion, CVS and more.

Helsinki Advanced Puppet Training: Sponsored by OlinData

2013-06-12T18:09:15Z

Pricing

€ 1,895.00 by July 28, 2013; € 1,995.00 on or after July 29, 2013.
** SPECIAL PRICING FOR ATTENDING BOTH PUPPET FUNDAMENTALS AND ADVANCED: €3,099.00 **
To pay directly, please contact training@olindata.com.