On Ruby Interviews James Turnbull and Reviews the Puppet Book

Pat of On Ruby has posted a brief review of James Turnbull's Puppet book, Pulling the Strings with Puppet:

This book is filled with helpful code samples and pointers to external resources that look very useful. It's well written and easy to understand. As good a tool as Puppet looks to be, this looks like an equally good book to get you going. If you're doing configuration management for anything more than a box or two, run, don't walk, and pick up your copy of Pulling Strings with Puppet.

Pat also posted an interview with James:

Who gets the credit (Or is it blame?) for the title of your book, 'Pulling Strings with Puppet'

That'd be my editor and the marketing guys at Apress. Do you know how excited marketing people are when a product allows amusing alliteration and puns' :) But I like it -- it's both kitsch and catchy.

Looks like the book is really helping with the visibility of Puppet, which is great, and people seem to even like the book so far. :)

Wed, 13 Feb 2008 | Tags: puppet, book, interview, jamesturnbull, review, ruby, onruby

Interview with me at On Ruby

Pay Eyler has posted his interview with me at On Ruby:

What are your future plans for Puppet?

I'm pushing toward a 1.0 this year, hopefully, as soon as I can get the critical APIs stable. I'm also hoping to add a lot of interesting functionality around making each host's resource catalog more useful outside of Puppet'e.g., you could have all of your resource relationships set up in it, modify /etc/ssh/sshd_config, and then tell Puppet to figure out what services need to restart because of that change.

As we move toward a more database-backed catalog, vs. the current YAML-dumped version, we'll get a lot more functionality out of it yet, and I can't really even see most of that functionality right now.

Sat, 09 Feb 2008 | Tags: me, interview, onruby, ruby

Podcast with Hyperic

I know it's been a long time since I posted, and there's lots to post about, but it's been a very long month with little time.

Until I get my act together (which likely won't happen until I'm in Melbourne for LCA), here's at least a snippet.

I did a podcast with John Mark Walker of Hyperic a couple of weeks ago when I was in San Francisco for the Velocity summit.

I actually haven't had a chance to listen to it yet, but apparently I do some smack talk or something. Give it a listen.

Mon, 21 Jan 2008 | Tags: industry, podcast, puppet, hyperic, interview

Second Interview by Michael Cote

Michael Cote has posted the second part of his interview of me:

Wed, 07 Nov 2007 | Tags: puppet, interview, cote, redmonk

Interview of me by Michael Cote

Michael Cote has just posted an interview with me:

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 | Tags: puppet, interview, cote, redmonk, video, innotech

John Willis on Puppet

John Willis of Tivoli fame posted on Puppet last week, after seeing my presentation at OSCON and interviewing me after BarCampNashville:

In all honesty, even though my focus has been on availability and event management in the OSS space, I find myself really intrigued by what Luke is doing with Puppet. In the early days of Tivoli, all the products were bound by the Tivoli Framework. At the core of the Tivoli Framework was the configuration management infrastructure. The Frameworks distribution manager made all the products, such as monitoring, inventory, user administration, and event management, viable in a large shop that had to manage many servers. Even today, as IBM/Tivoli is putting the final nails into the Framework coffin, thousands of Tivoli customers are scrambling to manage their infrastructures with all the new IBM products. As I look at all the extremely interesting OSS ESM tools out there, I struggle to understand how they will all integrate. Maybe in an Infrastructure 2.0 sort of way, the framework might be created by Puppet.

Fri, 31 Aug 2007 | Tags: puppet, interview, tivoli

OMC Interviews Luke

The Open Management Consortium has interviewed me about Puppet, discussion ranging through competitors, Ruby, and the development history:

Chuck Talk: Where do you see Puppet in the IT stack? Is this meant as a centralized management tool, a satellite management toolset, a NOC toolset - where do you see it working the best, and what makes an ideal environment for Puppet to be implemented?

Luke Kanies: I mostly talk about Puppet as a single tool, but the truth is that its lots of pieces packaged as a single tool. My real goal is to build multiple stacks communicating as part of an ecosystem of more advanced tools, where your configuration management tool talks to your monitoring tool which in turn talks to decision engines which in turn change the running configurations. Puppet is a first step towards that ecosystem, but I had to build a single product that could stand on its own, and towards that end Ive developed Puppet as a centralized management tool, where you perform all of your work on the central server and it propagates out to clients from there.

Reductive Labs is a member of the OMC, and it's great to see them starting to put out information about their members.