Here is the second video snippet from the Think Tank that Dell Services held the week before last. At the event we assembled 10 panelists representing both old school and new school organizations and discussed the challenges of the new app-centric world.
The short clip below features Barry Libenson, CIO of Safeway, Luke Kanies, CEO of Puppet Labs and Jay Ferro, CIO of the American Cancer Society. The three men talk about the pressure IT is under these days as consumerization drives up expectations and shadow IT has crept in.
Videos still to come
The persistently, ubiquitously connected to the network era
The week before last, Dell Services held a think tank in Silicon Valley with 10 panelists representing both old school and new school organizations. The group discussed the challenges of the new app-centric world as well as how to leverage both the “Four horsemen of IT du jour”: Cloud, Mobile, Social and Big Data, and the “three enablers”: Open Source, DevOps and APIs.
The idea of the Think Tank was not to look at technology for technology sake but from the view point of how it could meet customer and business needs.
Given the above, we started with question, “What do customers expect in an application today?” In the short clip below, Luke Kanies, CEO of Puppet Labs, Barry Libenson, CIO of Safeway and Jay Ferro, CIO of the American Cancer Society give their thoughts.
Videos still to come
IT is facing competition for the first time ever
The persistently, ubiquitously connected to the network era
In the cloud you can turn on 100s or 1000s of servers at the click of a mouse, but what happens when you want to configure them? If you do it by hand it will take you months if not longer. That’s where Puppet comes in, an automation tool that allows you to configure and manage legions of servers.
Back in September, at Venture Beat’s CloudBeat I moderated a session with Stan Hsu of Paypal and Luke Kanies, CEO and Founder of Puppet labs. During the session Stan talked about how Paypal used Puppet to automate their processes and increase responsiveness to the business.
After the session I grabbed some time with Luke to learn more about Puppet.
As Luke explained, as we have moved to cloud-scale the need for automation has continued to rise. With the cloud the rate of change continues to increase and time to value is what you compete on. As a result, shortening the amount of time between when your developers finish coding and your customers get access to those services is critical. Anything that lengthens that time is friction and the name of the game is reducing friction and increasing velocity. As Stan of paypal explained during our session you want to constantly examine your processes for bottle necks and then automate them.
With a tool like Puppet sysadmins can automate processes and move beyond the table stakes of providing a stable and secure environment and become more responsive to the business and ultimately the customer.
Some of the ground Luke covers in the above video:
How did Luke get in the automation game and where did the idea for Puppet come from? How form the start his goal was to make a tool that the vast majority of people could use, not just the gurus.
2:38 How have things changed in the eight and half years since he started Puppet?
4:46 Who are the primary users of Puppet? Why DevOps is poorly named and why it’s so important for sysadmins and operations.
Reductive Labs, the company behind Puppet, recently received $2 million in funding. Puppet, a framework for automating system administration across the network at scale, allows an admin to build and configure a passel of servers in a period of hours rather than months.
Earlier this month at Cloud World/Open Source World I sat down with Luke Kanies of Reductive Labs to learn more about Puppet, who uses it and what they plan to do with all that money.
Some of the stuff Luke talks about:
In the cloud you can turn on 100s or 1000s of servers at the click of a mouse, but what happens when you want to configure them?
Users include Red Hat, Sun, Dell, Rackspace and Google. Google manages their entire corporate infrastructure with Puppet.
No GUI for you! Puppet has its own simple language that you use to program your infrastructure and then Puppet runs it across your entire infrastructure. The language is based on Perl + Ruby + Nagios.
A good portion on the $2 million will be spent on building some GUI tools (along with a little sales and marketing)
Puppet is 100% open source and based on Ruby. There are no commercial features (yet).
Puppet has a pretty vibrant community: 1,200 – 1,400 on the user list along with what could be the largest system focused IRC channel.
Posted by Barton George 
Barton's Blog 