Talking to the Cloud’s Puppet Master: Luke Kanies

August 31, 2009

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…

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Posted by Barton George

Forrester’s James Staten Explains the Cloud

August 28, 2009

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…

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Posted by Barton George

Storage in the Cloud — talking to Zmanda’s CEO

August 27, 2009

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…

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Posted by Barton George

Talking to the Co-Founder of Rackspace Cloud

August 25, 2009

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…

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Posted by Barton George

The Cloudy Wisdom of James Urquhart

August 20, 2009

James Urquhart of Cisco and author of “The Wisdom of Clouds” blog on Cnet, gave a talk last week at Cloud World entitled, “Virtualization to Cloud.”  I wanted to capture some of the topics he talked about and learn a bit more so I grabbed him for a podcast after he got off stage.  Here is the result…

 

Some of the topics James tackles:

  • Whereas four months ago the question was  ”What is cloud”  the conversation has recently shifted to “how can I replicate some of the success stories that I’ve heard about?”
  • One effect of the cloud is that has greatly lowered the VC capital that start-ups require to get set up and going.
  • Internal IT needs to realize they are no longer delivering a product but are delivering a service.   To be of value to the business they don’t have to wire servers, they can help them through the process of getting the right compute power for each app.
  • Regulatory and industry standards will  be what dicates the speed of the evolution of the cloud, not technology.

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Brian Aker discusses Drizzle, DB for the Cloud

August 18, 2009

On the first day of Open Source World/Cloud World/Etc World I attended Brian Aker’s talk entitled “Drizzle, Rethinking MySQL for the Web.”  For those not in the know, Drizzle is a reworking of the MySQL database to slim it down and make it more appropriate for web-infrastructure and cloud computing .  I caught up with Brian after his talk to learn a little bit more about Drizzle, where its come from and where its going.

 

Some of the topics that Brian tackles:

  • Looking at what customer needs were not being addressed by MySQL.
  • Stripping stuff out of MySQL and setting up Drizzle as a microkernel design that modules can be added to.
  • One of the main goals was to allow greater community involvement in the development (currently Sun folks only make up 6-7% of those making contributions).
  • Is Drizzle production ready?
  • What cloud bits have been contributed to the project?
  • Why the name “Drizzle”?

Update:  Here’s the Register article based on this entry.

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Back from Cloud World with a Bunch of Interviews

August 17, 2009

Last week I headed out to San Francisco to attend the event formerly known as Linux World.  This year the annual fete was renamed “OpenSource World” and combined with a few other events to form: “OpenSource World/Next Generation DataCenter/Cloud World/North American Bass Fishing World” (ok, Im joking about the last one).

Trans America, a flatiron and Armani.

Trans America, a flatiron and Armani.

Dell kicked it off

The opening day keynote was provided by Dell.  In all honesty, it wasn’t our best effort.  It was particularly tricky since the speaker who was supposed to deliver the presentation had a medical emergency and Judy Chavis, director for business development and global alliances at Dell  had to step up and pinch hit at the 11th hour.  Here are two pieces written about the keynote, one more positive than the other.

Chinatown, Clouds and Cable Car

Chinatown, Clouds and Cable Car

Not exactly jam packed

I’ve been to Linux World a couple of times before and this year’s show, despite the amalgamation, was much smaller.  Those who came to talk to customers or generate leads must have been dissapointed since there seemed to be hardly any around.  That being said, I found it a great event to network and talk to various cloud players in the industry.  I was even able to record nine video podcasts that I will be posting over the next few weeks.
Coming attractions

So stay tuned for conversations with the following folks:
Brian Aker — Lead architect for Drizzle
James Urquhart – Big cloud thinker from Cisco
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
Chander Kant — CEO of Zmanda
Jonathan Bryce – Founder of the Rackspace cloud
Yerba Buena, the Metreon and the Marriott

Yerba Buena, the Metreon and the Marriott

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Our trip to Wimberley, Texas

August 9, 2009

Today we felt like day trippin’ so I got out our central Texas guide book and picked a destination:  Wimberley.  This town of ~5,000 is about an hour south of Austin and is made up of an interesting mix of artists and ranchers.  We had no idea what to expect but were pleasantly surprised by the lush river trail and the cute town center.

Here are a few pics from our adventure:

The three monkeys in the lead as we start off on the river trail.

The three monkeys in the lead as we start off on the river trail.

Pretty lush for central texas during one of the worst droughts in decades.

Pretty lush for central texas during one of the worst droughts in decades.

KInda felt like we were down on the Bayou.

KInda felt like we were down on the Bayou.

Yes, the walls of this house are made of bottles.

Yes, the walls of this house are made of bottles.

No room at the old Salty Chicken.

No room at the old Salty Chicken.

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

My first week at Dell

August 7, 2009

D_BadgeThis afternoon I finished my first week at Dell.  Needless to say it was a bit of whirlwind, but hey, I haven’t quit yet :) .

I spent the week trying to get set up — fighting with printers, getting used to Microsoft Vista, figuring out how to put my laptop to sleep etc. — as well as meeting with a slew of people who I will be working with going forward.

On Day 2 the Datacenter Solutions group, which I’m a part of, had their second half of the year kick-off.  It was a good opportunity to see where the group has come from and where they’re going.  This team has done/is doing some pretty impressive things with some of the world’s most humongous cloud providers.

My cube at the end of Day 1. No phone but a laptop and monitor.

My cube at the end of Day 1. No phone but a laptop and monitor.

The folks I met with were both within and outside the Datacenter team.   Outside of the Datacenter folks, I met with analyst relations, PR, members of Dell’s social media team, a former Sun compadre and even randomly ran into and had lunch with a neighbor.  I’ve been very impressed with how friendly and nice everyone’s been.  It will take a little while to learn the subtleties of the culture but it seems to be pretty WYSIWYG.

Parmer 2, the building I work in. (Note the clouds. Coincidence? I think not)

Parmer 2, the building I work in. (Note the clouds. Coincidence? I think not)

Next week I’m in the office on Monday and then off with the Datacenter Solutions chief architect and a few people from Dell’s open source team to Cloud World/Open Source World/Next Generation Datacenter in San Francisco (the event formally known as Linux World).  Dell has a keynote as well as a couple of talks and a booth.  It will be a good opportunity for me to learn more about what Dell’s doing in the space as well as meeting with folks in the industry in my new role as Cloud Evangelist.

Let the wild rumpus start.

Building 1 on the Round Rock campus.

Building 1 on the Round Rock campus.

One of the call centers for customer support.

One of the call centers for customer support.

Teamate Drew, patent holder and product planner, who has the good fortune of sitting across the aisle from me.

Teammate Drew, patent holder and product planner, who has the good fortune of sitting across the aisle from me.

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

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