Operations post by O'Reilly Radar

Jesse Robbins has posted about Operations on the O'Reilly Radar:

In my experience it takes about 80 hours to bootstrap a startup. This generally means installing and configuring an automated infrastructure management system (puppet), version control system (subversion), continuous build and test (frequently cruisecontrol.rb), software deployment (capistrano), monitoring (currently evaluating Hyperic, Zenoss, and Groundwork). Once this is done the "install time" is reduced to nearly zero and requires no specialized knowledge. This is the first ingredient in "Operations Secret Sauce".

It's great to see more noise being made about operations, and especially open source operations, on the larger O'Reilly sites. It's nice to see that people are starting to see that their operations can be a competitive advantage, and especially in this world of meteoric scale.

Tue, 23 Oct 2007 | Tags: puppet, radar, johnmwillis, ilike

iLike HJK and Puppet

As I mentioned, John Willis posted about Puppet, and in his post he mentions that iLike uses Puppet. Well, Adam Jacob, one of the partners at HJK Solutions, which is the company that did the Puppet work for iLike, has written up a bit more information:

Puppet enables us to get a huge jump-start on building automated, scaleable, easy to manage infrastructures for our clients. Using puppet, we:

1. Automate as much of the routine systems administration tasks as possible.
2. Get 10 minute unattended build times from bare metal, most of which is data transfer. Puppet takes it the rest of the way, getting the machines ready to have applications deployed on them. Its down to two and a half minutes for Xen.
3. Bootstrap our clients production environments while building their development environment. I cant stress how cool this really is. Because we are expressing the infrastructure at a higher level, when it comes time to deploy your production systems, its really a non-event. We just roll out the Puppet Master and an Operating System auto-install environment, and its finished.
4. Cross-pollinate between clients with similar architectures. We work with several different shops using Ruby on Rails, all of whom have very similar infrastructure needs. By using Puppet in all of them, when we solve a problem for one client, weve effectively solved it for the others. I love being able to tell a client that we solved a problem for them, and all its going to cost is the time it takes for us to add the recipe.

Puppet, today, is a tool that is good enough to handle the vast majority of issues encountered in building scalable infrastructures. Even the places where it falls short are almost always just a matter of it being less elegant than it could be, and the entire community is working on making those parts better.

I'm very happy to see people successfully building businesses around Puppet, and it's great to see that companies who are getting press are depending on Puppet to manage those famous applications.

Fri, 31 Aug 2007 | Tags: puppet, ilike, hjk, industry