Past Meeting - Monday, December 5, 2005
Puppet: Next generation open source server automation
*** At Town and Country Hotel -- see below ***Monday, December 5, 2005
6:30 P.M. - 8:30 P.M.As was discussed at our October meeting, the San Diego ACM had the opportunity to "do something" with the LISA'05 (Large Installation System Administration) Conference being held in San Diego. The chapter has arranged for chapter members to be able to attend evening meetings, i.e., "Birds of a Feather Sessions", for FREE! Meeting attendees who register by the cutoff date will receive their LISA'05 BoF badges at the SDACM Chapter meeting. (Regular daytime meetings and tutorials require conference registration.) As long time chapter members know, the chapter rarely has December meetings because of the potential for holiday conflicts. This year, the regular third Thursday of the month November meeting will be held on MONDAY, DECEMBER 5th to coincide with LISA'05, December 4-9. Further, we have lined up a speaker to give us a special session.
Join your colleagues at the next meeting of The San Diego Chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), featuring Luke Kanies founder of Reductive Labs . Reductive Labs is solving the problem of managing large networks of servers. It is essentially straightforward to keep one or a couple of machines running well, but as the number of machines goes up the amount of time spent maintaining them scales almost linearly. Traditional automation techniques like automated installers and scripts using ssh in a for loop work to reduce that scale some, but hand rolled mechanisms for managing large networks fall short rather quickly. Puppet is an Open Source Software tool that lets you centrally manage every important aspect of your system using a cross platform specification language that manages all the separate elements normally aggregated in different files, like users, cron jobs, and hosts, along with obviously discrete elements like packages, services, and files.
Please alert the sysadmins in your organization about the unique opportunity to attend LISA'05 here in San Diego. Here's the LISA'05 web site so you, and they, can check out the cool seminars, tutorials and papers:
Here's the flyer for LISA'05. (in PDF)
There will be great door prizes ... please reserve your seat (see below) before it's too late!
We will meet at 6:30PM at the Town & Country. The meeting cost is $3 for reservations paid in advance via PayPal or $5 at the door -- free for chapter members and registered attendees of LISA'05.
The meeting is open to the public. For more information, call (858) 452-8701.
(We are also pleased to acknowledge the generous support of Sun Microsystems, That Technical Bookstore, and UCSD Extension.)Bring your colleagues and friends to this don't miss event -- we hope to see you there!
Seat Reservations
Please reserve a seat using our new reservations and payment form -- there is a discount for reserving and paying using this form.
If you cannot use the reservations form (it saves us a lot of work if you can), send us an email at or call (858) 452-8701.
Please reserve your seat by December 4.
Abstract
Puppet lets you centrally manage every important aspect of your system using a cross platform specification language that manages all the separate elements normally aggregated in different files, like users, cron jobs, and hosts, along with obviously discrete elements like packages, services, and files.
Puppet's simple declarative specification language provides powerful classing abilities for drawing out the similarities between hosts while allowing them to be as specific as necessary, and it handles dependency and prerequisite relationships between objects clearly and explicitly. Puppet is an open source next generation server automation tool. It is composed of a declarative language for expressing system configuration, a client and server for distributing it, and a library for realizing the configuration.
The primary design goal of Puppet is that it have an expressive enough language backed by a powerful enough library that you can write your own server automation applications in just a few lines of code. With Puppet, you can express the configuration of your entire network in one program capable of realizing the configuration. The fact that Puppet has open source combined with how easily it can be extended means that you can add whatever functionality you think is missing and then contribute it back to the main project if you desire.
Presenter Bio
Luke Kanies received a B.A. in Chemistry from Reed College in 1996. He is the founder of Reductive Labs, an open source software company focused on building the next generation of system administration tools. He has been a sysadmin for nine years and has published multiple articles on Unix tools and best practices.
