Talking to the Cloud’s Puppet Master: Luke Kanies

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.

Pau for now…

About the Author: Barton George