The essential basis of running services in “the cloud” is that they run in virtual machines, which come with their own idioms and practices for managing them.  One of the mainstays of managing virtual machines (’VMs’) uses what’s called ‘golden images’.  These are images built up complete with the services they’re supposed to run, so [...]

I was a guest on last week’s IT Management Podcast again last week, and we ended up talking a lot about Puppet and the difficulties in running an open source software company.  As always, John Willis and Coté are informed and interesting.  Give it a listen, and maybe subscribe to the whole series.

Matt Rechenburg is the author of OpenQRM, a multi-platform provisioning tool (competing with tools like Kickstart and FAI).  He has recently announced integration between it and Puppet:
…this step is another milestone for the openQRM project which now includes the automatic configuration management features for the managed appliances powered by Puppet. With integrating Puppet into openQRM [...]

I just got back from LISA, and as has happened for the last few years, I was pretty disappointed. I think the thing that sticks out the most is how isolated the community is.  Maybe it’s because I’m used to hanging out with developers, entrepreneurs, and Web 2.0 types, who are always looking for the [...]