Planet Puppet

You’ve bought Pro Puppet, downloaded a couple of modules from the Puppet Forge (and have written some of your own too), and you’re on your way to implementing your Puppet environment when it hits you: something feels bulky with the way you’ve designed your Puppet code. Your modules may not be portable between environments (development, testing, production) without significant tweaks, each of your node declarations may require a number of variables in order for the code to work, or

I am very pleased to announce that R.I. Pienaar, founder and lead developer of the widely used Marionette Collective (MCollective) orchestration tools, has joined Puppet Labs as a Software Architect. R.I.’s message-based orchestration tools have become some of the most widely used tools in systems management, and have literally changed the way that people handle ad-hoc command and control, orchestration, and parallel job management. Having R.I. join the Puppet Labs team is a significant milestone for us,

One of the issues that crops up when working with Puppet is ensuring that your manifests do what you expect. Errors are bound to happen. A missed brace can make a manifest not compile, or forgetting to include a module or set a variable may mean that running Puppet on the host fails to enforce the expected state. All in all, it would help to have some tools to make sure we’re writing valid code, that it does what it expects, and that if it doesn’t we catch it as soon as possible.

Syntax Checking

At the

The first Puppet Triage-a-thon was a huge success. Thank you so much to everyone who attended and contributed! Some of our favorite stats from the event:

• We started the day with 2292 open tickets. Over the course of the day 565 tickets were triaged. We also closed 115 tickets. That’s almost 25% of the open tickets triaged and 5% closed!
• Seventeen community patches were submitted! (And many of these were merged during the day.) Several patches were from people who’ve never contributed before,

The Puppet community has grown quickly, and a lot of you have logged tickets and issues. We’ve tried to give those tickets as much love as we could but some slip through the cracks, and sometimes we get overwhelmed. We’ve recognised this and want to get a handle on the backlog of tickets. But we need your help.

Enter Triage-a-thon, hosted locally in our offices, virtually on IRC (#puppethack) and the Web. We’re going to review all the open tickets in the Puppet project with a view to:

• Update and

If you’re headed to SCALE 10x this weekend in Los Angeles, here’s a brief schedule to help you find us at the event:

• Register using our discount code PUP12 for 40% discount!
• Join us for a half-day training session on Friday 1/20 at SCALE University
• Come by booth #42 for a Puppet Enterprise demo, t-shirts, and stickers
• Stop by our BOF Friday 1/20 at 7pm for an informal Puppet discussion
• See Professional Service Engineer Carl Caum speak about AWS and Puppet at 4:30 on Sunday

Hope to see you

Puppet Camp Atlanta is only a few weeks away! If you’re in the Atlanta area or nearby region, this event is for you! Puppet Camps are local, 1-day events that feature a mix Puppet Labs engineers, local speakers, and unconference talks generated by the audience. We’d like to thank our Sponsor MomentumSI for helping make Puppet Camp Atlanta possible!

Registration is now open and the nearly-finalized schedule is available.

We hope you’ll join us for Puppet Camp Atlanta, the first of many

Written in conjunction with Tino Vazquez from the OpenNebula Project, and cross-posted on the OpenNebula blog.

Puppet is used for managing the infrastructure for many IaaS software packages, including Eucalyptus, OpenStack, and OpenNebula. OpenNebula is an IaaS manager which can not only manage a large amount of different virtualization and public cloud platforms, it can also emulate the API’s provided by EC2 and OCCI. It’s great for creating private and public clouds, as well as hybrids of the