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Tag: puppet labs

  • Barracuda Networks Advances DevSecOps Agenda

    Barracuda Networks Advances DevSecOps Agenda

    Thanks to the rise of DevOps, a fundamental shift is now underway in terms of the amount of influence developers exercise across the enterprise. Rather than simply dumping code on IT operations teams, developers increasingly are being held accountable for applications end to end. As such, developers now often exercise a lot more influence over which software-defined infrastructure and security platforms will be employed as part of what is referred to as the “shift to the left.” These platforms all have in common a well-defined set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that makes them accessible to developers.

    Against that backdrop, Barracuda Networks announced its Barracuda NextGen Firewall can be configured via the IT automation framework developed by Puppet Labs. Previously, only the company’s Web Application Firewall was integrated with the Puppet framework.

    In addition, the Barracuda NextGen Firewall is now available as a metered billing service in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace. That marks the company’s second metered billing service on AWS, after making a similar move with the Barracuda Web Application Firewall last year.

    Tim Jefferson, vice president of public cloud, says an increased focus on application security is driving an expansion of DevOps processes to now include DevSecOps driven by APIs rather than traditional user interfaces, which are not well-received.

    Jefferson says those REST APIs are critical for any security company that wants to stay relevant as organizations start to manage multiple development pipelines that are tied into a common continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) pipeline. In that context, Jefferson says it’s no longer sufficient for IT security companies to make their offerings available as a virtual appliance. Security tools such as firewalls need to be just another cloud-native application that can be orchestrated as part of a CI/CD process, he says.

    What’s more, DevOps teams have made it clear they want to be able to consume anything deployed on a public cloud in the same manner they consume compute and storage resources. That requirement is driving companies such as Barracuda Networks to add a metered billing option because many organizations in the age of the cloud don’t want to pay for a firewall unless it’s actually in use, says Jefferson.

    It’s too early to say precisely how DevOps and DevSecOps are transforming the way IT products and services are acquired and invoked. In the case of Barracuda Networks, for example, the company is taking the rise of DevOps as opportunity to expand its portfolio of products first to include data protection by acquiring Intronis and then, more recently, compliance and archiving tools by acquiring Sonian.

    Naturally, not every IT organization is equally far down the DevOps and DevSecOps path. But the various walls that have isolated various segments of IT are finally starting to come down at an increasingly rapid pace across the enterprise.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Top 5 Traits of High-Performing Teams

    Top 5 Traits of High-Performing Teams

    DevOps is here and it seems to be what everyone in IT service management (ITSM) is buzzing about. So what are the goals and how do we know it’s not just the next hot kitchen color for this year? DevOps is a cultural and professional movement that stresses communication, collaboration and integration between software developers and IT operations professionals while leveraging agile, lean and traditional ITSM practices.

    Stakeholders on the development side will include, but not be limited to, all of the people involved in developing software products and services. On the operations side it will include, but not be limited to, all of the people involved in delivering and managing those software products and services and the underlying IT infrastructure on which it is being delivered.

    The goals are to better align IT responsiveness to business needs, smaller more frequent releases, reduce risk, increase flow, improve quality and reduce time to market. These can only be accomplished by understanding the entire value stream, including the lead times and cycle times of the different areas that make up your value stream.

    Let’s take a look at the top five predictors of IT performance and see how engaging DevOps practices enhances our ability to become high-performing teams.

    1. The peer review change approval process provides enhanced and effective communication. When technical teams hold themselves accountable for the quality of their code through peer review their performance increases, resulting in 200 more times frequent code deployments, according to Puppet Labs’ “2016 State of DevOps Report.” Allows for an on demand deployment (multiple, daily releases) structure.
    2. Version control for all production artifacts. This provides a single source of truth for all changes. An integrated and automated tool chain along with practices such as continuous integration result in a three times lower failure rate, according to the report.
    3. Proactive monitoring enables teams to diagnose and solve problems faster and have a higher degree of accountability. Tie that in with a single source of truth and that results in 24 times faster mean time to recovery (MTTR), the report noted.
    4. High-trust organizational cultures allow for experimentation and learning, allowing people to take intelligent risks. Having this culture promotes the idea that repetition and practice is the prerequisite to mastery.  According to the Puppet Labs report, organizations with high NPS (Net Promoter Score) have shown much higher levels of employee retention and are 2.2 times more likely to recommend their company as a good place to work.
    5. A win-win relationship between Dev and Ops. It’s not Dev versus Ops, it’s Dev and Ops. Shifting left is about building quality into the software development process. When you shift left, fewer things break in production because issues are detected and resolved earlier. By building quality into the software development cycle, high-performing teams spend less time on unplanned work. We also found they spend less time remediating issues and spend more time on new, value-add work.

     

    — Drew Lapatin

  • Puppet Ignites Era of Constantly Modern Software

    PORTLAND, OR–(Marketwired – Apr 7, 2016) – Software underpins every part of modern life and commerce. Organizations rely on it to drive growth in all aspects of their business. According to market estimates, a $200 billion software infrastructure market is emerging as a result of mass migration to the cloud; pressure on IT to meet the demands of billions of consumers and business users; and the growing requirement to continually deploy and manage software to meet business goals.

    To help organizations compete effectively and thrive in a software-defined world, Puppet today announced its vision to give every organization the shortest path to better software. The company’s commitment to helping enterprises take full advantage of the movement towards constantly modern software is fulfilled by its industry-standard Puppet Enterprise platform. More than 30,000 companies around the world, including more than two-thirds of the Fortune 100, rely on Puppet Enterprise to continually deploy and manage software across their IT infrastructure, whether it’s physical, virtual, or in the cloud.

    “Software powers everything around us, from the devices on our wrists and our walls to the work we do, the fun we have, and everything in between. Modern cars are powered by millions of lines of code, our financial world is entirely mediated by software to enable speed and throughput, and it’s critical to delivery of core functions like medicine, utilities, and food. Nevertheless, most businesses take weeks, months, and even years to deliver everything from simple upgrades to the latest innovations, and too much of this software is out of date, insecure, and thus a barrier to progress rather than an enabler of it,” said Luke Kanies, Puppet founder and CEO. “With Puppet, customers build highly efficient DevOps practices that automate manual processes and get control of the entire infrastructure and application stack, eliminating constraints on innovation, securing critical capabilities, and maximizing the business potential from their software investments.”

    Opening the Gates to the Shortest Path to Better Software
    As part of the company’s strategic plan to make the shortest path to better software a reality for enterprises, Puppet also announced today new leadership, product updates, integrations, resources, and branding. All these elements support the company’s mission to help every organization significantly reduce the time it takes to provide both their internal and external customers with the most effective and modern software to achieve business goals.

    • Company name and brand refresh – The company is changing its name from “Puppet Labs” to simply “Puppet” to reflect the fact that the tight-knit Puppet community — tens of thousands of individual open source users and Puppet Enterprise customers — all refer to the company, the technology, and the community itself as “Puppet.” The new name, and a new brand identity to go with it, also reflect Puppet’s mission: helping every organization get on the shortest path to better software in service of its own customers and mission. For complete details, visit the new website at puppet.com.
    • First president and COO – Sanjay Mirchandani is the first executive to hold this position at Puppet. The former senior vice president of VMware will be responsible for Puppet’s go-to-market execution, including marketing, pre-sales engineering, sales, customer support, and services. For complete details, read our press release< (https://goo.gl/tKtnDO).
    • Project Blueshift and Puppet Enterprise 2016.1 – Blueshift represents Puppet’s engagement with leading-edge technologies and their communities — technologies like Docker, Mesos, and Kubernetes — and Puppet’s commitment to giving organizations the tools to build and operate constantly modern software. The new Puppet Enterprise 2016.1 gives customers direct control of — and real-time visibility into — the changes they need to push out, whether to an app running in a Kubernetes cluster or a fleet of VMs running in AWS. For complete details, (https://goo.gl/RTMS2v).
    • Atlassian HipChat integration – This new integration makes it possible for DevOps teams to direct change with the Puppet Orchestrator, see change as it occurs, then discuss and collaborate on changes in process — all right in HipChat. For complete details, read our press release (https://goo.gl/Xk2CrX).
    • Splunk integration – Proactive monitoring of infrastructure and applications is a key DevOps practice, enabling continuous improvement. The Puppet Enterprise App for Splunk now extends the Splunk platform to Puppet customers to diagnose issues and solve problems faster, so they can deploy critical changes with confidence. For complete details, read our press release (https://goo.gl/Fi9BFd).

    Additional Resources

    About Puppet
    Puppet is driving the movement to a world of unconstrained software change. Its revolutionary platform is the industry standard for automating the delivery and operation of the software that powers everything around us. More than 30,000 companies — including more than two thirds of the Fortune 100 — use Puppet’s open source and commercial solutions to adopt DevOps practices, achieve situational awareness and drive software change with confidence. Based in Portland, Oregon, Puppet is a privately held company with more than 400 employees around the world. Learn more at puppet.com.

    Press Contact:
    Justin Dorff
    (510) 875-9608
    pr@puppet.com

  • Puppet Labs Launches Annual State of DevOps Survey

    Puppet Labs Launches Annual State of DevOps Survey

    Puppet Labs has announced its 5th annual State of DevOps Survey. In the past five years, we’ve surveyed more than 20,000 technical professionals around the world, spanning all industries and companies of all sizes. We’ve captured a tremendous amount of data about how IT performance, culture, technical practices and organizational performance intersect.

    What sets our survey apart from the many other surveys out there is that it’s science-based. Yes, there is a science to creating surveys and analyzing data, and there’s also an art to translating all of that amazing data into something that’s useful to the industry at large.

    This year, we’ve partnered with DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA), founded by our friends Gene Kim, Jez Humble and Nicole Forsgren. If you’ve been following the DevOps conversation for a while, their names should be familiar. Together, our goal is to help advance the DevOps community and help technology organizations improve their practices through rigorous scientific research.

    Through our analysis, we’ve been able to quantify IT performance. We know that high-performing IT teams deploy code 30 times more frequently, with 60 times fewer failures, and they recover 168 times faster. We also know the factors that predict IT performance—technical practices such as continuous delivery, cultural norms and lean management—which in turn predict organizational performance.

    This year’s survey seeks to dive deeper into each of these areas, while also shedding light on new areas of research, including:

    • ROI of IT performance. What can you expect from your investment in DevOps? Our goal is to understand how throughput, stability and quality affect the bottom line.

    • Security and compliance. What role do security and compliance play in a DevOps environment? Some people see security as a roadblock to DevOps, but we want to investigate if it has to be that way.

    • Quality. So you’re deploying code faster than ever. What’s the quality of that code?

    • Containers. How do containers affect IT performance? Are they making IT’s job easier?

    • Lean management. Last year we found that lean management practices such as limiting work in process and creating and maintaining visual displays showing key quality and productivity metrics predict IT performance. This year’s survey looks at additional lean management practices to help us better understand what it really means for a technology organization to go lean.

    The survey seeks answers to questions we get all the time and we believe they reflect the broader concerns of the DevOps community. Your experience matters and we hope you’ll share it by taking the 2016 DevOps Survey. It should only take about 20 minutes, and when you complete the survey, you’ll be entered to win some great prizes (see the official rules), including :

    Please take the survey and share it with your friends and peers. Together, we can make IT better for everyone.

    About the Author/Alanna Brown

    unnamedAlanna Brown heads up DevOps research and go-to-marketing strategies at Puppet Labs. She also works closely with Puppet Labs product owners and engineers to develop a roadmap and support for Puppet on Windows.

  • Puppet Labs Launches Fifth Annual State of DevOps Survey

    PORTLAND, OR–(Marketwired – Mar 22, 2016) –  Puppet Labs, the leading provider of IT automation software, today announced that it has opened the survey for the fifth annual State of DevOps Survey and Report (http://bit.ly/2016DevOpsSurvey). This one-of-kind, comprehensive industry study provides enterprises with insights into how DevOps, automation, IT and organizational performance impact the world’s leading organizations. The 2015 report revealed the critical role that IT leaders play in a company’s DevOps transformation, affirmed that through the power of DevOps and automation, high-performing organizations have 60 percent fewer failures and recover 168 times faster, and demonstrated that DevOps provides a powerful competitive advantage.

    This year’s report is being conducted in partnership with DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA), founded by IT and development experts Gene Kim, Jez Humble, and Nicole Forsgren. The survey will examine a number of new research areas, including:

    • ROI of IT performance. Exploring the ROI of IT performance and technical practices to better understand how throughput, stability and quality measures affect the bottom line.
    • Security and compliance. Security and compliance are top of mind in the DevOps space. This year’s survey investigates the role security plays in a DevOps environment.
    • Quality. Past reports have revealed the impact of DevOps practices on key IT performance metrics for throughput and stability. This year’s survey will help to better understand how quality is affected by DevOps practices.
    • Containers. Containers are no doubt changing the IT landscape. The survey will make clear how much containers are truly affecting IT performance.
    • Lean. Last year’s report found that lean management practices such as limiting work in process and creating and maintaining visual displays showing key quality and productivity metrics predict IT performance. This year’s survey will continue diving into lean practices to boost productivity and performance.

    “As DevOps practices have been increasingly adopted in all industries, we hope to have even more people in IT share their experiences through this year’s DevOps survey,” said Nigel Kersten, CIO of Puppet Labs. “We’re looking to get more information on how well DevOps practices actually pay off for organizations that make this investment, and which practices lead to more effective IT and more successful organizations.”

    “DORA is honored to participate in this year’s survey,” said Gene Kim, one of the co-founders of DORA and co-author of The Phoenix Project. “Organizations in all industries increasingly adopt DevOps because the business value is so high. More than ever, this research helps us understand what organizational and technical practices are required to make DevOps work, as well as how to measure its value.”

    In addition, for the first time in the survey’s history, Puppet Labs and DORA have opened sponsorship to a consortium of companies that are both leaders and innovators within the DevOps space. Current sponsors of the report include Atlassian, Automic, CA Technologies, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, IT Revolution, Splunk, and ThoughtWorks.

    To participate in the 2016 DevOps Survey and Report, visit (http://bit.ly/2016DevOpsSurvey)

    Additional Resources

    About Puppet Labs
    Puppet Labs, Inc. is the leader in IT automation. Puppet Labs software provides system administrators the operational agility, efficiency and insight they need to proactively manage dynamic infrastructure, scaling from tens of servers to thousands, both on premise and in the cloud. Thousands of the world’s leading organizations use Puppet Labs software to configure and manage their IT infrastructure, including Bank of America, Cisco, NYSE, Salesforce.com and WebEx. Based in Portland, Oregon, Puppet Labs employs more than 360 people. The company is backed by investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Google Ventures, VMware, Cisco, True Ventures, Radar Partners, and Emerson Street Partners. To learn more, please visit PuppetLabs.com.

    About DevOps Research and Assessment, LLC
    DevOps Research and Assessments (DORA) brings together the leading DevOps experts and researchers to help technology and business leaders create world-class technology organizations, leveraging insights from Gene Kim and Jez Humble, renowned experts in the space of IT operations and development, and Nicole Forsgren, PhD, an expert in metrics and psychometrics in software delivery and IT impact.

    In the last three years, DORA has compiled tens of thousands of respondents from technology organizations around the world. By doing this, DORA can benchmark organizations against their industry peers, and provide guidance to leaders on how they can address any gaps to achieve their technology and organizational goals.

    Media Contact
    Justin Dorff
    PR Manager
    (510) 875-9608
    justin.dorff@puppetlabs.com
  • Git: One Giant Leap Toward DevOps

    Git: One Giant Leap Toward DevOps

    If you work in an organization that has not yet embraced DevOps, then you might be wondering where to begin. Fortunately, there are many good answers. But I want to introduce one simple starting point that you probably haven’t heard: introducing Git to operations. By itself, Git might not seem like a meaningful way to overcome the barriers between dev and ops. Yet, Git provides some capabilities that mark the difference between the lowest performing IT organizations and the highest. And the difference in IT performance can translate into substantial business benefits. The highest performing IT organizations have noticed the following benefits:

    • They are about twice as likely to exceed profitability, market share and productivity goals.
    • Their employees reported far higher levels of job satisfaction.
    • They realize 50 percent higher market capitalization growth over a three-year period.

    To be clear, no amount of data will ever prove that use of Git leads directly to growth, profit, productivity and job satisfaction. What the Puppet Labs’ “State of DevOps Survey” does show is the incredible range between low and high performance in IT organizations. The rate of deployment has hovered at 30 times faster for high-performing organizations over the lowest. The 2014 survey showed 50 percent fewer deployment failures, while 2015 showed 60 percent fewer deployment failures, when comparing highest to lowest. The survey also indicates which practices separate the highest performers from the lowest. According to the State of DevOps Survey, the top two indicators of high performance are:

    • Version control of all production artifacts (surprisingly, a far greater predictor of performance than version control of source code); and
    • Peer review of production changes (in contrast to external change approval).

    It’s not that these two practices magically yield business benefits. Indeed, ITIL has long recognized management of production artifacts and review of production changes as best practices. But too many organizations still believe faster deployment and higher reliability are trade-offs. What is “magical” in high-performing organizations is they realize they can have both faster deployment and higher reliability by collaborating across organizational boundaries and automating intelligently. That means dev and ops sharing goals, measurements and tools. So one way in which these practices differ from typical ITIL practices is how dev and ops perform them collaboratively. More specifically, when dev and ops use the same tool for version control, they can better share techniques and workflows. For example, the peer review of changes can include both dev and ops. Thus, Git is a gateway to DevOps.

    Git has long provided those two capabilities for software developers: Developers use Git to version source code and developers use pull requests to perform peer review of source code. With a few tips about how to apply Git to configuration files, operations can use pull requests to perform peer review of configuration changes. Now with git-lfs, operations can also version production artifacts, which often are large, binary files that historically have not worked well with Git. More advanced concepts such as infrastructure as code and dedicated binary repositories, for example, build on version control, so even if the role of Git changes over time, the skills and collaborations remain valuable.

    In summary, the business case of Git for Ops is simple. The Puppet Labs survey shows meaningful upside for low performing IT organizations to become high performing. The survey shows high performing organizations are characterized by both rapid deployment and high reliability, not picking one over the other. Two practices that characterize high performing IT organizations are version control of production artifacts and peer review of changes. Git is now well-positioned to provide both capabilities. If you’re ready to start introducing operations to Git, don’t forget that Bitbucket has no limits to the number of private repositories.

     

    About the Author/Ian Buchanan

    ianWhile Ian Buchanan has broad and deep experience with both Java and .NET, he is best known as a champion of agile methods in large enterprises. He is currently the Developer Partisan for Developer Tools at Atlassian, where he focuses on the emerging DevOps culture and the application of Bitbucket and Bamboo for better continuous integration and continuous delivery. During his career, he has successfully managed enterprise software development tools in all phases of their life cycle, from cradle to grave. He has driven organization-wide process improvement with results of greater productivity, higher quality and improved customer satisfaction. He has built multinational agile teams that value self-direction and self-organization. When not speaking or coding, you are likely to find Ian indulging his passions in parsers, meta-programming and domain-specific languages.

  • Puppet Labs Announces Two New Executive Hires

    Amid 72 Percent Year-over-Year Growth, New Executive Additions Will Drive Continued Ecosystem Growth and Product Innovation

    Portland, OR – February 11, 2016 – Puppet Labs, the leading provider of IT automation software, today announced two new additions to the company’s executive team, coming on the heels of another year of stellar growth while nearing cash-flow profitability. Simon Hayes joins the company as senior vice president of business and corporate development to build upon Puppet Labs’ dynamic partner ecosystem. Jamie Hull joins as vice president of product, and will drive further innovation in Puppet, the world’s most widely used IT automation tool.

    “I’m happy to announce two great additions to our executive team who will accelerate product innovation and drive further growth in our ecosystem during an important time of our growth,” said Luke Kanies, founder and CEO of Puppet Labs. “Jamie and Simon will be fantastic assets to Puppet Labs. Their strong leadership skills will propel Puppet Labs forward as we bring automation and its benefits, from 15 percent penetration, to the entire market.”

    unnamed As the head of business and corporate development, Simon will drive Puppet Labs’ partner strategy and execution. Simon joins Puppet Labs from Citrix where he was vice president of portfolio, strategy and alliances. In that role, Simon built the strategic alliances organization to create and manage partnerships with global technology companies like Cisco, Microsoft, SAP, IBM and Fujitsu, all of which were key to Citrix’s success. During his time at Citrix, he was also responsible for the “Citrix Ready” ecosystem program and the company’s open source development organization, and also led the portfolio strategy team for Citrix’s Enterprise Service Provider Business.

    “Puppet Labs’ leadership in IT automation has been enabled by the most robust partner ecosystem in the industry, and a strong commitment to collaboration and customer success,” said Simon. “I look forward to helping Puppet build its next phase of growth through strategic partnerships and by building a world-class ecosystem.”

    unnamed-1Jamie Hull will lead the Puppet Labs product team. As the former vice president of mobile products at Evernote, Jamie will bring an empirical user-first perspective to how Puppet Labs builds, develops and ships software to its users. At Evernote, Jamie headed up the iOS and Android product teams and led development of the two core mobile platforms, from initial design through development and to deployment. Prior to joining Evernote, Jamie led product and development teams at a mix of consumer product and B2B service companies, including Comcast (Plaxo), UpMo, Blurb and AOL/Advertising.com. She began her career in web development, where she managed engineering, product development and user experience.

    “Puppet Labs has a long history of building products that its users love, and that provide real results for businesses,” said Jamie. “I’m excited to work with Luke and his team to build upon these successes and to shape the future of Puppet for the next decade.”

    Additional Resources:

    About Puppet Labs

    Puppet Labs, Inc. is the leader in IT automation. Puppet Labs software provides system administrators the operational agility, efficiency and insight they need to proactively manage dynamic infrastructure, scaling from tens of servers to thousands, both on premise and in the cloud. Thousands of the world’s leading organizations use Puppet Labs software to configure and manage their IT infrastructure, including Bank of America, Cisco, NYSE, Salesforce.com and WebEx. Based in Portland, Oregon, Puppet Labs employs 400 people. The company is backed by investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Google Ventures, VMware, Cisco, True Ventures and Radar Partners. To learn more, please visit PuppetLabs.com.

  • PuppetConf 2015 attendees solve problems, change lives with DevOps, automation

    A thriving community of more than 7,000 IT professionals gathered online and in-person for Puppet Labs’ annual PuppetConf 2015 event recently to learn how leading global enterprises such as Uber, Walmart and Wells Fargo develop strong organizational cultures and leverage DevOps, automation and other modern IT tools and practices to solve problems and build high-performance data centers serve millions of customers and “change lives.”

    pic1

    The art of life-changing problem solving through automation isn’t lost on Puppet Labs’ customer Walmart. Senior Technical Expert Martin Jackson quoted a colleague who foresaw the benefits Puppet Labs would deliver when it first started using the company’s IT automation software, “‘We’re going to change lives with this,’” a prophecy he said has been fulfilled.

    In tangible terms, the life-changing results he spoke about to the capacity audience were measurable. With Puppet Labs automation software, Walmart went from having relatively few nodes managed through automation to a whopping 48,000 in a short period.

    pic2

    Walmart Senior Technical Expert Martin Jackson presenting at PuppetConf 2015

    With this level of automation, Jackson said his organization has been better able to support Walmart in achieving its goal to serve millions of customers at the lowest possible price.

    Most consumers, or even business end users for that matter, don’t think much about what goes into processing something as a simple as a banking transaction from a mobile device or computer. But PuppetConf attendees know there is a complex spider web of tech behind making an app as common as one used for online banking work.

    Wells Fargo, the world’s largest bank by market capitalization, is a Puppet Labs customer leveraging automation technology for application orchestration, automation of node configuration and application deployment.

    Using “Back to the Future” as his metaphor, Wells Fargo DevOps Manager Nate Loomis talked about the need to be on the cutting edge of IT, while also keeping services to customers reliable and dependable. When Wells Fargo IT shifted from a node-centric view to an application-centric one, its provisioning started moving much faster — from months to the time it takes to get a cup of coffee.

    With Puppet Labs, Wells Fargo manages 120,000 nodes and 55,000 network devices to process more than 1 billion transactions daily, hosts more than 2,300 applications in production with more than 40 percent of its operations fully automated.

    pic3

    Wells Fargo DevOps Manager Nate Loomis presenting at PuppetConf 2015

    Culture Matters

    DevOps is more than just tools. While addressing the crowd at the Portland Convention Center, Uber’s Head of Business Intelligence Komal Mangtani emphasized that its IT culture pushes engineers to experiment in the name of progress and to constantly be on the lookout for new ways to solve problems.

    pic4

    Uber Head of Business Intelligence Komal Mangtan presenting during PuppetConf 2015

    With a picture of The Martian leading man Matt Damon on the jumbo screen, Mangtani borrowed a line from the film when she told attendees, “If you solve enough of the right problems, you get to go home,” a humorous reference to wide-spread use of Uber by patrons to get rides home that wasn’t lost on the crowd. She emphasized that while most people think of Uber as an app, ride and car, there is much more to it than just that — pointing out that that within its IT culture is a dedicated team of “fierce yet humble” engineers that are helping the company to deliver more than 1 million rides, daily.

    Summing Things Up

    pic5

    Although he opened the conference, Puppet Labs founder and CEO Luke Kanies summed up the whole point of IT automation and DevOps during his keynote which included a live demo of Puppet Application Orchestration. While addressing the conference, he told the crowd, “We at Puppet Labs are here to help you get there. As a company, we are all about reducing the timeline from the moment you get new technology to the moment it’s in the hands of your users delivering real value. You are going to see us as a company evolve over time to get better and better at aligning the tools we provide and the work we do enable with helping you more directly, more consistently and more repeatedly delivering customer value.”

    For a more in depth look at PuppetConf 2015, visit the blog: https://puppetlabs.com/blog/puppetconf-2015-day-1-back-to-the-future-with-application-orchestration

    Watch the keynote: https://puppetlabs.com/presentations/puppetconf-2015-lukes-keynote-address

  • Puppet Application Orchestration: Orchestrate the entire stack

    Puppet Application Orchestration: Orchestrate the entire stack

    In advance of next week’s PuppetConf, Puppet Labs is announcing a major new addition to their lineup, Puppet Application Orchestration. The orchestration functionality will allow users to automate configuration, deployment and management of your entire infrastructure stack, wherever it resides.  This is a significant uplift from managing just one instance or server at a time.

    I had a chance to speak with Luke Kanies, founder and CEO of Puppet Labs ahead of today’s announcement. Kanies has led Puppet through its 10+ year existence and has seen it grow from an open source project to over 400 employees, raise $87m in venture with over 1000 customers and more than $75m in revenue.

    I asked Luke what orchestration meant to him, as I think it is a term that is thrown around a lot in technology but not everyone agrees on exactly what it means. He gave me one of the best definitions I have heard, “orchestration is doing related things in a related way”.  In Kanies view the new functionality from Puppet Labs allows organizations of all sizes to “orchestrate their complete software stack allowing for the automation of the software supply chain.”

    This orchestration functionality is another step along the way of the eventual goal of a world where software is written primarily by software. This Matrix-like future Kanies believes is inevitable. It may happen in 20 years or maybe 50 years, but it will happen.

    The real key to this new orchestration tool is that it is more than just being able to automate multiple servers or instances. It actually orchestrates (there is that word again) how these disparate parts of your infrastructure run. It takes into accounts dependencies and events from other parts of the infrastructure in determining how and when to run other parts of it. Puppet says it best in their press release, “ensures that the right things happen in the right order on the right machines as the application is deployed, updated or destroyed.” This awareness is what makes this really special.

    Of course another big part of the equation is that this really does run across your entire stack. Whether it be in a public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, bare metal, on prem or even containers, Puppet’s application orchestration can manage them all from one central app.  That is pretty impressive.

    To enable this functionality Puppet Lab’s team had to develop some new extensions and additions to its scripting language or DSL. This shouldn’t present much of a hurdle to the thousands of people who already use Puppet Labs products.

    Puppet’s new orchestration tool is another indication that the IT industry is becoming more and more app-centric. Applications are driving business and IT with it. Where they live and how they are built is complex and IT teams are looking for tools that make it simpler to deploy and manage these far flung, multi-homed applications that are popping up at ever increasing rates.

    Kanies himself will be demonstrating the orchestration module at PuppetConf next week during his keynote on Thursday, October 8, at 9 a.m. PT. If you are not attending PuppetConf you can follow along on the Livestream.

    It will be interesting to see how this new Puppet tool changes the market. It could set off another wave of integration and third party functionality that leverages this full stack management.  Who knows maybe somewhere right now there is some software writing some software that will take advantage of Puppet Application Orchestration.

  • DevOps Leadership Series: Boston Common

    DevOps Leadership Series: Boston Common

    DevOps is coming, DevOps is coming!  You could hear the rallying cry around the city of Boston on September 15th and 16th.  This is when the DevOps Leadership Series crew headed up north to attend DevOps Days Boston.  

    We first caught up with Beno Chapman (@BenoChapman), release engineering leader at Constant Contact.  Beno shared, “Don’t be afraid to prototype something”.  Sage advice for many DevOps practitioners.  He also provided perspective why we should all consider “productizing services” that we offer to stakeholders across the different functional areas of our business.

     

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWQitydh904

     

    Next, we hung out with Anthony Spring (@DevOpsAnthony), minister of DevOps culture and tech lead at Yieldbot.  Anthony delivered a compelling lightning talk in Boston around quantifying technical debt.  He shared a brief recap of that topic and then discussed a new theme in DevOps conversations that points to challenges around hiring the right people and vetting the right tools.

     

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQufvcFiRmo

     

    Jeremiah Sullivan (@Jeremiah_NYC), Technical Solutions Engineer at Puppet Labs, joined us next.  He talks about the growing interest in containerization and solutions like Docker and Rocket.  Jeremiah then shared some insight into how DevOps teams are expanding beyond automation at the server level to now include managing infrastructure like switches, load balancers, and hypervisors.

     

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEcIeBIrQNI

     

    We’ll continue coverage from DevOps Days Boston in our next post with videos from James Meickle (Site Reliability Engineer at Harvard) and Jennifer Davis (co-author of Effective DevOps – O’Reilly 2015).

    Want more?  You can find the entire library of 21 videos from this series on YouTube.

     

    Screen Shot 2015-09-23 at 10.01.31 AM

     

    Special thanks to my colleague, Mark Miller for capturing these videos for us at the event.