Vlogs

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…

In this interview, Dell's Franklin Flint describes how a customer works with Dell's OEM group, even influencing the design of Dell-branded products for use in their hardware appliances.

Using the Google Search Appliance as an example, Franklin describes how the PowerEdge R710 server includes more network interface cards (NICs), better customization of the LCD display panel, internal flash memory capabilities and other features that make it OEM friendly, or an "appliance-inspired" server platform.

Have a listen:

At Cloud World/Open Source World earlier this month I grabbed some time with Forrester’s “Mr. Cloud” James Staten.  I wanted to get his take on Cloud Computing and what was hot and what is not.  Here is the result:

Some of the things James talks about:

• How the conversation about cloud has changed over the last year.
• He spends a lot of time telling people what the cloud is not.
• The three things they’ve learned (coming soon to Forrester report near you):
  • First thing to do in the cloud is test and development
  • Organizations can take short term web promotions and marketing efforts and drop them into the cloud (witness Wendy’s 99c promotion)
  • Put apps that are triggered by revenue into the cloud
• Rather that “Public vs Private” clouds, Forrester segments it into “internal vs. hosted vs. public
• Cloud is not an all or nothing proposition, it’s another tool in the toolkit.

Pau for now…

I first met Chander Kant, CEO of open source cloud back provider Zmanda, last year at the MySQL conference.  At that time we did an audio interview.  Just like Jonathan, this time around I caught him on “film.”

This is the fourth out of nine interviews I conducted earlier this month at Cloud World/Open Source World.

Some of the things Chander talks about:

• Thanks to open source and the cloud, Zmanda is able to provide “radically simple to use and cost effective” back-up software.
• Zmanda had its roots in a project out the University of Maryland back in ‘91.
• How Chander got the idea to build a business around this project.
• How the cloud is a good fit for secondary and tertiary storage.
• Cloud storage is often people’s first foray into the cloud.  One reason is the ease of billing.
• Why a publisher moved their storage to the cloud.

But wait there’s more…

Stay tuned for five more interviews from Cloud World/Open Source World coming soon to this URL:

Michael Crandell — CEO of Right Scale

Ken Oestreich — VP of product marketing at Egenera

John Keagy — CEO of GoGrid

James Staten — Analyst covering cloud computing at Forrester

Luke Kanies — Founder of Reductive Labs, maker of Puppet

Pau for now…

Earlier this month at Cloud World/Open World I bumped into Jonathan Bryce one of the two founders of the cloud platform formerly known as “Mosso”  (now known as Rackspace Cloud).

Last year when I interviewed Jonathan, I did an audio podcast.  This time around I was armed with my Flip Mino and caught it all on video for the little(r) screen.

Some of the topics Jonathan addresses:

• When Rackspace funded employees Jonathan and Todd to go off and start their cloud venture 4 years ago, why didn’t they brand it “Rackspace?”
• Why did they recently decide to roll Mosso back into the mothership and rebrand it?
• The progression of in-house -> colocation -> managed hosting -> cloud.
• The three pieces of Rackspace Cloud: Cloud Servers & Cloud Files (infrastructure as a service) and Cloud Sites (platform as a service with the option of using either the LAMP or .NET stack).
• Which offering is getting the most traction.
• Why their customer Fresh Books went with Cloud Files.

Pau for now…