O'Reilly and Operations

Tim O'Reilly posted an article about operations and the open-source world, discussing a bit how little focus there is on operations. I thought it was ironic, considering they're on the verge of their OSCON conference, at which there are only two talks on operations and my talk on Puppet was rejected.

I left a comment at the bottom:

I agree that operations, far beyond deployment into full lifecycle
management, are critical. Ironically, the new generation of web
application entrenpreneurs seems to be both ignoring and causing
problems of scale -- PubSub's founder commented that doubling his
server's RAM was his scaling plan -- and its requisite management
problems. Rails is a great framework but it's easy to build
resource-hungry applications with it that are very difficult to manage.

Given how important operations are, I'm surprised at how difficult it is
for entrepreneurs in this space, like myself, to get the attention of
VCs or media. I expect that my proposal about my product Puppet was the
only one to OSCON that attempted to address operations automation, yet
it was rejected.

It would be nice to see O'Reilly spend 1/100th the effort that you spend
on "Web 2.0" companies, advertising projects like Puppet, Radmind, RT,
OpenNMS, and the few other open source operations applications out
there. I still get comments on my O'Reilly cfengine articles from 3
years ago, because they're about the only published works on automation.

I've had a hard time finding people even interested in developing in
this space, and I can't help but think that's at least partially because
web apps are treated so sexily by entrepreneurs and media companies
while operations is ignored.

It's hard to believe there's any reason for people like me to attend
OSCON. There are exactly two (2) talks in the whole conference that even
come close to talking about operations -- a talk on RT and a talk on
HP's Linux infrastructure. There are tons of talks about and by Google,
whose operations infrastructure is closed source, and there's this
article about Microsoft whose entire business model is closed source.

No talks about operating system developments that make systems easier to
manage (like Sun's SMF and Apple's launchd), no talks about managing the
web applications produced by the tens of "Web 2.0" talks.

I guess I should make it more prominent that Puppet is written entirely
in ruby and uses Rails a little bit.

Hopefully this article by Tim will cause him to start looking more closely at what's out there, but it seems unlikely. It'd certainly be great to get just a fraction of the superstar treatment that O'Reilly and everyone else give to web and linux people.

Fri, 14 Jul 2006 | Tags: technology