Self-description

I seem to find myself having to describe myself a bit too much these days, and I can't seem to reuse any of the biographies. I just recently wrote a bio for ;login: magazine, because I wrote a version-control-for-sysadmins article for them:

Luke Kanies runs Reductive Labs (http://reductivelabs.com), a startup producing OSS software for centralized, automated server administration. He has been a Unix sysadmin for nine years and has published multiple articles on Unix tools and best practices.

Then I described myself in an email about looking for a partner:

I am the founder of Reductive Labs (http://reductivelabs.com), an open-source software company dedicated to revolutionizing the task of server administration. The main product I'm working on right now is Puppet (http://reductivelabs.com/projects/puppet), which is basically a library capable of modeling all of the configurable elements on servers (users, packages, files, cron jobs, etc) and a domain-specific language built for specifying an entire network's configuration in one specification. It has been developed based on years of experience using older-generation tools like cfengine and ISconf, along with years of participation in the sysadmin research community (which is disappointingly small).

Once Puppet is mature and it is possible to get the servers to configure themselves as desired, my focus will shift to building feedback loops into the network, including intra-server, inter-server, and human-server feedback loops. Once the tools know enough to configure the system, they can use that same knowledge to make the systems themselves more resilient, and also provide enough context to logs, metrics, and other system-generated data to make most administration tasks significantly easier.

And finally, a bio for a presentation I'm doing at AUUG:

Luke Kanies is the developer of Puppet, a next-generation configuration management system. He has been a sysadmin for nine years and has published multiple articles on Unix tools and best practices. He founded Reductive Labs as a software company focused on open-source system administration tools, because our tools have not been keeping up with our problems.

Update: I ended up modifying, at their request, the bio for AUUG:

Luke Kanies is the founder of Reductive Labs, an open-source software company focused on building the next generation of system administration tools. He has been a sysadmin for nine years and has published multiple articles on Unix tools and best practices. His current focus is Puppet, a next-generation server automation framework developed from the perspective that computers should be managed as a network instead of individually.

Puppet lets you centrally manage every important aspect of your system using a cross-platform specification language that manages all the separate elements normally aggregated in different files, like users, cron jobs, and hosts, along with obviously discrete elements like packages, services, and files. Puppet's simple declarative specification language provides powerful classing abilities for drawing out the similarities between hosts while allowing them to be as specific as necessary, and it handles dependency and prerequisite relationships between objects clearly and explicitly.

Fri, 21 Oct 2005 | Tags: luke