During last week’s DevOps Days here in Austin, Matt Ray of Opscode and Charles Lowell of the Frontside did a demo showing the status of the Project Sputnik profile tool and the cloud launcher. The profile tool is still at a very early stage, and while the Cloud Launcher exists today in the form of LXC + JuJu, we are working on a version that works using Chef.
After Matt and Charles’ talk I grabbed sometime with them as well as Chris McClimans of Opscode to talk about where we’re at, where we’re going and what’s a spice weasel.
Last week, during the OpenStack Summit that was held in Portland, Oregon, a 55 year-old soviet satellite was spotted a various indoor locations. Rumor has it that the satellite was named after a project at Dell to create a developer client-to-cloud platform.
Sputnik satellite streaks through warehouse where Mirantis/Dell party is held during OpenStack summit.
Sputnik satellite spotted hovering above Dell booth on the expo floor at the OpenStack summit.
Last week Dell’s cloud group was out in force at the OpenStack Summit in Portland, Oregon. Its amazing to see how the event has grown since the first design summit back in July of 2010.
I got to catch up with a bunch of people, and attend a few sessions and some parties. I also got to spend a fair amount of time in our booth and was impressed by the amount of interest we had in the XPS 13 developer edition.
Near the end of the first day I joined John Furrier and Jeff Frick in the Cube for a chat. We talked about the growth of OpenStack, DevOps and Project Sputnik.
If you’re thinking about getting a Dell XPS 13 developer edition you might want to check out the comprehensive review published by Ars Technica this weekend:
In an effort originally known as Project Sputnik, Dell dedicated resources into doing Linux on an Ultrabook “right”—writing code where necessary (and contributing that code back upstream like a good FOSS citizen) and paying attention to the entire user experience rather than merely working on components in a vacuum. The result is a perfectly functional Ultrabook with a few extra tools—that “Developer Edition” moniker isn’t just for show, and Dell has added some devops spices into the mix with this laptop that should quicken any developer’s heartbeat.
Last week we announced the arrival of the 1080p version of the XPS 13 developer edition, code name Sputnik 2. At that time the system was available online in the US and Canada and from Dell reps in Europe. Today the system is available online in the following European countries:
Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK (see below for the links to the individual product pages). Norway will be coming online next week.
The Ubuntu logo graces the base plate of the XPS 13 developer edition
Product pages for XPS 13 developer edition by country/language
In the following three countries you get your hands on an XPS 13 developer edition by calling your local Dell office:
Finland +358 (0)207 533 533
Luxembourg +352 26 30 47 1
Poland +48 22 579 59 99
Working on
We are currently working out a strategy to try and support the following countries. Stay tuned for updates.
Israel
Morocco
Russia
Saudi Arabia
South Africa
Turkey
UAE
With regards to the Asia Pacific region, we currently do not have plans to introduce the XPS 13 developer edition in that region. We continuously listen for customer feedback and demand and will reevaluate accordingly.
On Monday, we announced the new 1080p display for the XPS 13 developer edition and its upcoming availability in Europe and beyond. To support that launch, here is the official spec sheet as well as a brief presentation on the project and resulting product.
When we launched the Ubuntu-based XPS 13 developer edition at the end of November we got a lot of great press. That being said, the two complaints we heard loud and clear were 1) the resolution is too low, and 2) it needs to be available outside the US and Canada. Since that time we have been working hard to address both.
As of today the XPS 13 developer edition comes with a Full HD (FHD) display (1920 x 1080) and has begun rolling out in Europe.
On beyond North America
For those in the USA and Canada Sputnik 2, the XPS 13 developer edition with the FHD display, is now available online. Across the pond Sputnik 2 has started rolling out and will be available online next week. I will post the links when they become available but here is the list of the countries where Sputnik 2 will be landing:
Available online – France, Germany, UK, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland
Available from your Dell rep – Israel, Luxembourg, Morocco, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkey, UAE
With regards to the Asia Pacific region, we are currently evaluating options to introduce the XPS 13 developer edition in Australia and other countries in Asia, but don’t have details to share at this time. That being said, if you would like to help with the introduction, share your opinion in the comments
Product specs
The new FHD version of the XPS 13 developer edition will replace the existing unit. All other specs of this client-to-cloud solution will stay the same.
Here are the highlights:
Processor: 3rd generation Intel i7
Display: 13.3″ Full High Definition (1080p)
System memory: 8GB
Graphics: Intel HD graphics 4000
Hard drive: 256GB SSD drive
Standard Service: 1 year Dell ProSupport and onsite service after remote diagnostics
Operating system: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS
Community projects: Cloud launcher and Profile tool
To reflect the upgrade to the improved display the new price for the solution will be $1,549.
What about the Cloud Launcher and Profile Tool?
Ever since we first announced that we were launching a project to explore the creation of an open source developer laptop, we talked about two associated community beta projects: The Cloud Launcher and the Profile Tool.
Profile Tool: The idea behind the profile tool is to provide access to a library of community created profiles on github, such as Ruby and Android, to quickly set up your development environments and tool chains.
Cloud launcher: The cloud launcher enables you to create “microclouds” on your laptop, simulating an at-scale environment, and then deploy that environment seamlessly to the cloud.
With the mad rush to get Sputnik and then Sputnik 2 out the door we haven’t focused as much attention on the associated projects as we would have liked. Now that the systems are going out the door we are looking to kick them up a notch. We will soon be taking the Profile Tool effort off of pause.
With regards to the Cloud launcher, we have big plans for it (its what puts the “cloud” in “client-to-cloud” solution). Today the launcher uses Juju to jettison application environments from the laptop, to the cloud. Recently though we have been working with Opscode to create another version that leverages Chef and that will connect to the Dell Cloud on Demand. We should have a demo and more available soon!
Last week I was out in the Bay Area attending the Open Compute (OCP) Summit. The event was packed and full of energy. My employer Dell was a platinum sponsor and we were showing off some pretty cool stuff:
At today’s Open Compute Summit in Santa Clara, California, Dell showed off a new generation of X-Gene 64-bit ARM-based servers that the company is developing for data center customers. It also demonstrated new management software based on Open Compute Project standards allowing remote control of both Intel and ARM-based servers. The software and server designs Dell demonstrated would allow Intel and ARM-based systems to run in the same chassis. – Ars Technica
Here is the schematic of the management system (check out the client running the ipmitool
As part of the first day plenary sessions, Dell VP and Senior Fellow Jimmy Pike gave a brief historical overview of computing and management, leading up to the above solution.
The next Open Compute Summit will be in Vegas in the fall. Look for us there.
A little over six months ago we announced a scrappy skunkworks project to pilot a developer solution based on Ubuntu 12.04LTS and our sleek XPS 13 laptop. Thanks to the amazing feedback and support we have received from the community, today we are announcing the availability of the resulting official product – the Dell XPS 13 laptop, developer edition.
What’s exactly is it?
Here is an overview of the components of this client-to-cloud solution and some key facts:
Hardware: XPS 13 laptop, high-end config
I7 CPU, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD
Software
Ubuntu 12.04 LTS
Basic set of drivers, tools and utilities (complete list)
*Updated 11/30/12: the community pointed out we had not priced consistently across our online stores, this has been fixed. This offering was always intended to be priced less than Windows.
Availability
Small office/consumer - U.S.
Enterprise – U.S./Canada
Outside the US – early 2013
Community projects: Profile tool and Cloud Launcher
The profile tool and cloud launcher are beta open source projects that we have just kicked off on github. These projects are quite nascent at this point and we are looking for more people to get involved and help get them going (hint, hint ) .
Profile Tool: The idea behind the profile tool is to provide access to a library of community created profiles on github, such as Ruby and Android, to quickly set up your development environments and tool chains.
Cloud launcher: The cloud launcher enables you to create “microclouds” on your laptop, simulating an at-scale environment, and then deploy that environment seamlessly to the cloud. Today the launcher utilizes Linux Containers to model your environment on your laptop and then uses Juju to jettison that environment to the cloud. The launcher project on github will allow for community expansion on this concept using different technologies and approaches.
How did we get here?
As I mentioned at the beginning, project Sputnik began as a skunkworks effort. It was made possible by internal incubation fund designed to bring wacky ideas from around the company to life in order to tap innovation that might be locked up in people’s heads.
Just weeks after the basic concept was greenlighted by the innovation team, it was publically announced as a pilot project at the Ubuntu developer summit. The big focus of our efforts, particularly in the beginning, has been to work with Canonical to make sure that we had the appropriate drivers for all functionality including the pesky touchpad.
From the start, the idea was to conduct project Sputnik out in the open, soliciting and leveraging direct input from developers via our Project Sputnik StormSession, comments on this blog, threads on the Sputnik tech center forum as well as the project Sputnik beta program. In fact it was the tremendous interest in the beta program that convinced us to take Project Sputnik from pilot to product.
I would like to give a special shout out to the beta cosmonauts who signed on. They were an intrepid lot who were patient and diligent working through issues to help make sure that when we went to production we had a product that developers would want.
Where do we go from here?
The next big thing for XPS 13 developer edition is availability outside the United States. We are working with teams inside of Dell to make this so as quickly as we can. The other direction we are looking at potentially expanding is offering a bigger beefier platform for developers. The XPS 13 is perfect for those who want an ultra light and mobile system but we have heard from a bunch of devs who would also like an offering that was more workstation-like with a bigger screen and more RAM.
Today is a very proud moment for our team, putting together an official Dell offering for developers with their input and suggestions through out the process. Stay tuned for more to come!
I thought I would take a break from feverishly preparing for the project Sputnik product launch, to give an update on the Profile tool.
As you may remember, besides the needed drivers and basic utilities/tools there are two “extra-bits” that are part of the overall project Sputnik solution: the Profile tool and the Cloud launcher. I will use a future post to give an update on the Cloud Launcher but today I want to focus on the Profile tool.
Project Sputnik Profile tool
With regards to the Profile tool we are doing a bit of reset on this effort and going forward will be doing the development out in the open and asking the community to dive in.
What is the Profile tool
In short, the profile tool provides access to a library of community created profiles on github, such as Ruby and Android, to quickly set up your development environments and tool chains.
What I’d like to see is not only a gold-standard configuration, but also a meta-system to manage your developer configuration… The devops revolution is about configuration as code. How cool would it be if my laptop configuration were code that I could store in a source repo somewhere?
Here’s how it would basically work, when a developer creates a profile based on a development framework e.g rails, this profile template is published to central catalog. On another machine, the same developer—or another developer if the authoring developer makes his template shareable—grabs the template and runs it. The profile tool then reads the template, brings in any necessary dependencies (packages, package archives, SCM repositories, keys, dotfiles, etc) and places them in a sandbox within the user’s home directory.
Making it so, with a little help for our friends
Our original idea was to build out the profile tool in two phases: Phase I – “System Configuration” and Phase II – “User Configuration.” We started down the path of building out Phase I but have realized two things 1) we cant look at the two phases separately and 2) we need to be developing this out in the open and incorporating direct feedback.
Given this we are opening up development at the Sputnik page on github and are looking for people like you to steer the course we eventually take. At this stage nothing is set in stone and the profile tool is experimental beta work with several different prototypes. If this is something that appeals to you please dive in and help shape the future of project Sputnik!
The Project Sputnik Beta program has been going for several weeks now. We have an intrepid group of cosmonauts and there have been a bunch of blogs posted, tweets tweeted and a flurry of activity on the forum.
In general the feedback has been very positive with some folks having issues around wifi and the touch pad.
So far four of the cosmonauts have posted detailed entries around their Sputnik experiences. Here are excerpts from the postings.
After initial load and getting my standard working environment up and running, I’ve got to say this little beast is pretty amazing. From the tight OS integration to the feel of the laptop, it looks and feels like a solid build. I’m going to be busy working with OpenStack over the coming months and I’m excited to see how closely integrated I can get my build envionment on this laptop to the ubuntu server I’m using for testing. After watching Mark Shuttleworth talk this year at Oscon about JuJu and #ProjectSputnik, I’m pretty sure it’s going to be amazing. More blog posts to follow.
One man’s journey back to Linux
This next blog kicked off a huge discussion on hacker news around developer laptops, OS’s and the merits of their various incarnations. Geoffrey Papillion wrote about his odyssey through time and across various OS’s which has led him to the present and Linux once again.
Two days ago I got my Dell XPS 13 as part of a Dell beta progam called project Sputnik. I got a special version of Ubuntu, with some kernel patches, and some patched packages for sleep and hibernation. After an hour of struggling with making a bootable USB drive from my Mac for my Dell(turns out it was an issue with the USB drive), I had a working computer. By 8pm I had my development enviroment setup, I had chef up and running, and even my VPN was working. I was amazed.
So, far its been good; most apps I use are web apps. I spend 70% of my time in a terminal, and 30% of my time in a web browser. Honestly its the perfect computer for me right now. So, I’m waving goodbye to the ecosystem Mr. Jobs built, and moving to the world of linux full time.
I sound much like a crochety old man who dislikes change. I’m going to give this a go and see what happens. I’m now embarking on the always annoying task of getting my homedir and configurations from one machine to the other. I’ll report back after some real usage.
The Woodward Trilogy
The most prolific cosmonaut award goes to Matt Woodward who has been putting his project Sputnik laptop through its paces and written three entries about it.
Conclusion: The Dell XPS 13 is a huge winner in my book. It’s exceedingly well built, light, quiet, and has all the bells and whistles you need in an ultrabook — particularly one aimed at developers — and Dell made intelligent omissions across the board with the possible exception of the amount of RAM pre-installed.
If like me you’ve had Dells in the past and hadn’t thought about Dell in a while, this machine may well change your mind about Dell. After only a few hours of using it it’s certainly starting to change mine, and I can already see myself gravitating to the Sputnik as my go-to machine.
Summary: After living with the Sputnik as my only machine for a week I continue to be extremely impressed. Particularly in a developer conference situation where power isn’t available at every seat and you have to fight for the few outlets that are available, the Sputnik’s fantastic battery life let me focus on the conference instead of worrying about whether or not my laptop was going to conk out.Other than the occasional issues with the trackpad I thoroughly enjoyed using the Sputnik at DjangoCon — it makes a great conference companion!
So that’s the initial round up. Stay tuned for more!
First of all, I would like to thank all the applicants to the Project Sputnik beta program for their patience. Since we announced the program last month we have been working on implementation, traveling mostly uncharted waters here at Dell. After working through countless details and seeing what could actually be done in a timely and supportable manner, we have come up with our list of Beta cosmonauts.
The Beta Cosmonauts
We had hoped to make the beta program worldwide, but after digging in we found that the resources needed to execute on it turned out to be more than our little Dell/Canonical team could handle. As a result we have decided to narrow our Beta effort to the United States. From those applicants from the US, which represented close to half of the total number of applicants, we have selected 455 people.
It wasn’t easy to narrow the list but we picked people who represent a cross section of the developer population from start ups to large companies to universities. They represent a wide variety of skills and experience and are the people who we feel will be most vocal and participatory and who best represent the Sputnik ethos.
What they get – Updated Aug 30
Tomorrow we will send out the emails to everyone in the program letting them know whether they have been selected or not. Those selected, and who are still interested in participating, will be able to purchase the high-end XPS13 at $1,199 rather than $1,499*. As the program continues we will continue to refine the software. In return…
*Update Aug 30: We took the feedback re the desire for a deeper discount and went back to see if there was any more cost we could drive out the base price. We found a couple of places and were able to lower the base price from $1,499 to $1,349.99. Applying the 20% discount to this we are now able to offer the system to Beta cosmonauts at $1,079.99 ($120 less than before. It’s not a huge difference but I assume every little bit counts).
What we are asking of them
Load the software: While we had hoped to be able to offer the beta systems with Ubuntu pre-loaded this has turned out to be a lot more difficult than we had thought and would require shifting resources from our launch in the fall. As a result, unfortunately the systems will come with Windows pre-loaded. All the Beta cosmonauts will need to do is follow the directions for installing Ubuntu as listed on the Canonical page.
Be vocal and transparent: We want the cosmonauts to blog and tweet (hashtag #ProjectSputnik) about their experience as a beta tester, but if asked or when appropriate disclose that they received a discount from Dell.
Use it and contribute: As beta testers we want the cosmonauts to use the system, try things out, file bugs and share their experience with us and each other on the project Sputnik Forum. It would also be awesome if they could even contribute a profile or two when we make the profile tool available.
Support: given that this is a beta program we won’t have official support for the hardware or software. That being said we will try our best to help out the cosmonauts via the forum and bug tracker.
Thanks again to everyone who applied to the program. Dell and Canonical are very excited to hear what people think of the systems and learn what we can do to make them better.
Key links
Where to get the image for Project Sputnik – Canonical page
I apologize for the radio silence since OSCON. Since announcing that we would be delivering a product this fall, our little team has been working hard to get us locked and loaded on the roadmap. We have also been focusing on the Profile tool that Canonical has been building for us.
The other big effort that has consumed a lot of our time is ironing out the logistics for the Beta program we announced last month. Stay tuned, we hope to have some news on this a little later this week.
Who knew?!
Turns out that taking Project Sputnik from incubation project to real product and launching a beta program at the same in a highly accelerated manner involves a lot of uncharted territory within the company. We are learning as we go along.
Thanks everyone for your patience and stay tuned for more Sputnik news.
The conversation below took place right after Mark Shuttleworth’s keynote. Tim and Mark start off by talking about Mark’s persistence of vision and what keeps driving him. At the 2:00 minute mark they talk about Project Sputnik, the buzz around it at OSCON and where it has the advantage over Mac OS. From there they talk about bringing the cloud right to the desktop via Juju.
On the Thursday at OSCON, Ubuntu and Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth gave a great keynote entitled, “Making Magic From Cloud To Client.” He did the entire keynote and live demo on a project Sputnik laptop (a Dell XPS13 running Ubuntu 12.04LTS)!
Here it is in its entirety:
Some of the ground Mark covers:
A fantastic demo on Juju and writing Juju charms showing how you can design a complex topology, deploy that in memory on your laptop and then map the whole shebang to the cloud.
How JuJu charms allow for “encapsulation and reuse”
The idea of crowdsourcing ops
A demo showing how, in realtime, you can map actual running infrastructure from one cloud to the next (in his demo he mapped it from EC2 to an HP cloud)
The idea behind Unity and the principle of having one UI that works across phones, tablets, desktops and even TVs.
The week before last I had a fantastic time at OSCON, seeing old friends and making new ones. As always, the hallway track was the one I found most enlightening.
On the second day we announced that project Sputnik would be going from project to product in the fall and got a fantastic response (see some of the articles written about it at the end). On the day of the announce Mike Hendrickson, O’Reilly’s VP of content strategy, interviewed me about the project (check out Mike’s project Sputnik review). That video is the first one below.
I also did a “cliffs notes” version with Janet Bartleson which clocked in at one minute and 47 seconds so if you’re short on time you can check out the second one.
Extra-credit reading
Slideshow: Linux, Open Source & Ubuntu: OSCON 2012: The Open-Source Creative Engine Drives the Economy – eWeek
A couple of weeks ago we announced a Beta program for the four-month old Project Sputnik — an effort to investigate creating a developer focused laptop based on Ubuntu and Dell’s XPS13 laptop.
Since the beta announcement we have received thousands of applications from around the world. This tremendous response, on top of fantastic amount of input we have received on the Project Sputnik storm session, has convinced us to take this project from pilot to product.
This fall we will be offering an Ubuntu 12.04LTS-based laptop pre-loaded on Dell’s XPS13 laptop.
Going from skunk works to mainstream
Back in the Spring, project Sputnik was the first effort green-lighted by an internal incubation program at Dell. Thanks to the incubation program we got a little bit of funding and some executive advisers. This incubation program notwithstanding, project Sputnik has been a pretty scrappy skunk works effort to date.
The idea behind the incubation program is to harness that scrappiness and inventiveness to explore & validate new ideas & products outside mainstream Dell processes. Thanks to the tremendous amount of support both outside (you, the community!) and inside Dell, with today’s announcement, we will begin making our transition to an official, “mainstream” Dell product.
I should also mention, if its not obvious, that we have not been doing the work alone. Canonical has been “scrappin” right besides us, helping to drive the project and doing a ton of engineering on the software side.
Beta program
As I mentioned at the start we have been completely blown away by the number of applications we have received. We’re currently working through logistics of how to handle the tons of applications, we’ll notify all applicants soon, and intend to keep that process and the future product aligned with the spirit of the program.
To make sure that we are listening to your ideas, please continue to post any thoughts about what you would like to see in a developer laptop on our Storm session. If you have an XPS13 running Ubuntu and want to share your experience or report a bug or issue, see our forum on Dell Tech center.
Profile tool: a software management tool to go out to a github repository to pull down various developer profiles e.g. javascript, ruby, android.
Cloud tool: will allow developers to create “microclouds” on their laptops, simulating a proper, at-scale environment, and then deploy that environment seamlessly to the cloud.
Extra-credit reading
Press release: Dell Demonstrates Commitment to Open Source Software, Developer Communities
Last week project Sputnik got an official presence on dell.com. While the project is still a skunk works effort rather than a product, we are rapidly gaining traction within the company.
If you’re not familiar with project Sputnik, its a laptop pilot targeted at developers and based on Dell’s XPS13 ultrabook and Ubuntu 12.04LTS.
The new page points you to where you can buy an XPS13 (unfortunately still pre-loaded with Windows at this time), where you can get the image to load, where you can offer suggestions, read about people’s experiences and where you can sign up for a beta unit.
Be a Beta Cosmonaut
If you are interested in getting your hands on a project Sputnik beta unit we are now recruiting volunteers for the Sputnik Beta Cosmonaut program (and yes we know the original Sputnik was unmanned, we’re taking artistic license here). A limited number of applicants will be selected to receive a discounted, beta version solution (Dell XPS 13 Ultrabook with Ubuntu 12.04LTS pre-loaded).
If selected, all we ask is that you use the system regularly and give us your honest feedback on the project Sputnik forum. It will be interesting to see if we get five people applying to be cosmonauts or 5,000. Stay tuned…
Along with a landing page on dell.com, we recently launched a project Sputnik presence on Dell TechCenter. On TechCenter, you can find a Sputnik wiki as well as the forum I mentioned above to share experiences with Sputnik and file bugs.
BTW both Dell and Canonical will be at OSCON and one of the things we’ll be talking up is project Sputnik. Stop by and say hi if you’re there.
If you’ve been following project Sputnik — a developer laptop pilot based on Dell’s XPS13 ultrabook and Ubuntu 12.04LTS — you’ll know that the biggest draw back in these initial weeks has been the lack of multi-touch support in the touchpad. For some this has been annoying, for others this has been such a pain that they have put their system aside until the driver becomes available. I’m happy to say that as of a few hours ago, a fully open source driver is now publicly available.
The Sputnik ISO image is pre-configured to use the PPA for updates so all systems which were previously installed with that ISO will automatically be offered the PPA update and their touchpads will just start working. Furthermore, even systems which are installed now (or later) using that ISO will still automatically be offered the updated PPA kernel when they do their first software update.
There is also a link on the Sputnik PPA page to the Cypress driver patch (and also to the whole DellXPS patch set), so folks building their own kernels from source can get it from there.
Shout outs to…
A big thanks to Kamal from Canonical, Mario on the Dell side for driving this, and the vendor Cypress for doing the work!
I’ve meant to blog more frequently around Sputnik but it’s been crazy busy marshalling resources within Dell for our little skunk works project.
We have captured a lot attention within the company and are trying to leverage that attention to help beef up our core team. One of the areas outside the company we have gotten a great deal of support from is Canonical, the commercial sponsor behind Ubuntu.
Here are a couple of the areas we’ve been working on with Canonical:
The Touchpad
Probably the area we’ve gotten the most amount of inquiries into is the status of the driver being written for the touchpad to allow multi-touch support. Last week Dell and Canonical received two code drops from the vendor and they are looking very good. Its only a matter of time now before we have driver in the XPS enablement PPA. Stay tuned.
Update June 21: the driver for the touchpad is now available!
The Profile tool
Over the last couple of weeks we had a series of calls with folks from Canonical to scope out the effort around the profile tool.
The basic idea around the tool is that instead of stuffing the system with every possible tool or app a developer could possibly want, we are keeping the actual “stuff” on the install image pretty basic.
Instead we are working with Canonical to put together a tool that can go out to a github repository and pull down various developer profiles e.g. Android, Ruby, Javascript…
After our conversations we decided to break the effort into two phases:
Phase I – “System Configuration”:
The first phase will focus on installing bundles of packages with a YAML-driven approach. This will allow developers to get installable components of the toolchains they need
Phase II – “User Configuration”:
The second phase is focused on automating the configuration of the developer’s toolchain and environment, using a model-driven automation tool like Chef, Puppet etc.
The idea would be to create an open community where developers can share these profiles, extend them, etc.
We are still figuring out the feasibility of this phase and gauging interest.
We’d be interested in any comments or thoughts you have around the profile tool, or anything else having to do with Sputnik.
I’m hoping to start providing more updates (keep you fingers crossed)
Posted by Barton George 
