Pulling the Strings of Puppet

By Alex Handy

August 1, 2008 —  (Page 1 of 3)
When Luke Kanies ran servers for a living, he used cfengine all the time. This open-source set of tools for configuring and maintaining Unix-like computers was useful, felt Kanies, but when it came down to it, the system required a great deal of handling and feeding to work in many situations.

That’s why four years ago, after Kanies’ proposed changes for cfengine had been denied, he set out to create his own configuration and maintenance framework. That framework is called Puppet, and though it’s not even reached version 1.0, it’s already used to varying degrees by Google, Red Hat and Sun.
 
It should be said that Kanies was not a software developer. Coding simply became a means to an end for him as he learned and taught himself along the way. As a result, said Kanies, Puppet behaves as though it was created by a systems administrator, not a software developer.

That’s why Kanies teamed up with college buddy Andrew Shafer earlier this year. Shafer is now director of Reductive Labs, the company Kanies set up to shepherd Puppet’s growth. Shafer has a degree in math and a masters degree in computational engineering and science. Together, the pair are ramping up to make Puppet the default configuration framework for Linux and Unix users.

Kanies is a forceful personality. Now, about to become the father of twins, he jokes that he’ll name one of them “Control.” It’s this interesting and strong demeanor that’s made Kanies a polarizing figure in IT.

Jesse Nelson, Unix architect at social networking site Military.com, said that he can’t live without Puppet. “When it comes to sysadmin infrastructure software stuff, people just don’t seem to get it,” said Nelson. That’s why most admins write their own tools, he said. But Puppet was written by an admin, said Nelson, so it’s significantly more flexible and suitable to real-world situations.

While Nelson gushes about Puppet, just as many people aren’t a big fan. Ben Rockwood, director of systems at Joyent, thinks that Puppet is too controlling. “Joyent actually employed Luke for a week, then he quit/was fired. He has a very strong personality. When I was hired, the first thing I did was remove Puppet completely from the infrastructure. In general, I don’t like tools that are that hands off. When you say, ‘This is my config for 100 boxes,’ and you say go ahead and push it out, that’s terrifying,” said Rockwood.

Related Search Term(s): open source, Google, Puppet

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