As I tore off the first month of my over-sized school-year calendar I was reminded of my first week at Puppet Labs. I woke up early, made breakfast, and caught a bus into downtown arriving 30 minutes early only to be reminded that I didn’t yet have a key to the office. I plopped down in front of the door to wait for someone else to arrive, and opened my notebook to review the topics for my first official meeting with my new boss. Scrawled in my notebook are limited, and partially illegible jottings I took from our previous conversation. Unfortunately, between his Australian accent, frequently altered speech tempo, and foreign use of commonplace terms, and the fact that my penmanship skills hover around a 3rd grade level, all I could make out is one line: “Puppet Camp-do it.”

With that extravagant amount initial information, the last four weeks, James’ guidance, and the help of our wonderful in-town event planner Julie, I have hobbled together what I think will be a pretty awesome event. So without further ado I give you the top five reasons to attend Puppet Camp:

Reason 1: You Own It

Puppet, and Puppet Camp are user driven. Without the community the product, and the event would fall to pieces. With that in mind Puppet Camp is run as an “unconference” or “open-space” conference. Essentially, while we have some morning lectures planned, they can be influenced by the audience and deviate from their topic or forget about it all together depending on your wants. Similarly our afternoon breakout sessions are completely user generated. During morning break and lunch you have the opportunity to suggest any number of topics for afternoon breakout sessions. Speaking of breaks of course brings us conveniently to…

Reason 2: The Edibles and Drinkables

We’ve got a pretty reasonably sized breakfast of fresh fruit, yogurt, bagels and cream cheese, and muffins to serve along with juice, coffee and tea. Breaks are accompanied by cookies, and soft drinks, and lunch features a soup, salad, roasted veggies, and a sandwich bar buffet with chicken, roast beef, and hummus. While you may be on your own for dinner, we are offering an open bar at Swig on Thursday night which will offer…

Reason 3: Networking Potential

Short of sharing a plate of spaghetti, there really isn’t a better way to forge relationships than over a pint and one of Swig’s 150 whiskeys and whiskies. Whether you want to find your next employer, meet Volcane, or just swap stories with other Puppet users, Puppet Camp provides the opportunity. Because of the events’ flexibility, it caters to novice Puppet users, Puppet Masters, and everything in between, behind, and around. You’ll be amazed by the people you’ll meet, the industries and companies they hail from, and the size of their Puppet implementations. As you converse, hopefully…

Reason 4: You’ll Learn, Learn, Learn

You’ll learn more about Puppet in 2 days that you could have in a month. You’ll learn about our future goals for the product, trade-secret work-arounds, and a whole host of other information. No matter how active you are in the community there is really no equal to learning, face to face, from other users. The exchange of knowledge Puppet Camp induces is by far its most valuable aspect, which leads me to want to end here but…

Reason 5: You Really Ought to Attend Developers Training

If you can stay the weekend you can sign-up to attend Puppet Developers Training starting on Monday, October 11th and ending Wednesday the 13th. Developers training teaches you how to extend Puppet by adding custom facts, types and providers, and more. This class is offered on a limited basis so be sure to sign up if you have the chance.

In addition to all opportunities and benefits listed above, you’ll get some exclusive Puppet Camp swag, and get a well deserved opportunity to visit San Francisco. You can reside with us at the Serrano Hotel using our group discount code or take to the city and explore. I hope you join us for Puppet Camp 2010. We’ve got an awesome line up of presenters and entertainment waiting for you in San Francisco.

We are always eager to share the experiences our customers have using Puppet to automate their infrastructure. We recently added two more case studies.

• Clickability: Puppet helps Clickability dramatically increase their speed of deployment and ensure consistency across all servers. Download the case study
• MorphLabs: MorphLabs uses Puppet for configuration management automation and to quickly deliver custom cloud services. Download the case study

From the start, we saw Puppet as a key enabler of the services we offer our customers. Puppet let us deliver an easy to manage, customized system, cheaper and more efficiently compared to other configuration management tools on the market. Using anything else would consume too much time and resources for our customers.

—Guy Naor, founder and CTO, Morphlabs

There are several more case studies in the works. If you want to share details on your use of Puppet, please let us know.

What Happened and Why

Today we announced our Series B funding round. As most of you know, I’ve been at this for a long time – I started Puppet and (then Reductive Labs) Puppet Labs in March of 2005.  The plan was always to build a great infrastructure software company, and Puppet is one of the successful open source projects that’s always had commercial backing – this has been my full time job since that day in March.  My goal back then was to bootstrap, growing our revenues enough to continue hiring developers and increasing our product portfolio.  Over the years I’ve talked about products that I was really excited to build but never had the resources to, like Runnels (an infrastructure-focused message bus framework) and Nodify (recently released as the Dashboard).

Unfortunately, the reality I ran into is that it’s actually really hard to bootstrap a company like that, and over the last couple of years it became clear that fundraising was the best thing I could do to get the company moving faster.  We’ve been able to grow really well since our round with True Ventures last summer, and we’re finally getting a handle on our current development load, but our goals are still more aggressive than we’ve been able to accomplish.  We were on track to be profitable this year, but not to get all of the awesome things done that we want to work on.

This left us with either scaling back our ambitions, or scaling up our capital.  Given how the buzz around the cloud is driving interest in infrastructure, and especially in automation, it didn’t make sense to step into the background – now is the time to double down, not pass and hope to bet again later.  We don’t need a ton of money – we’re a lean company (good lessons learned from living deal to deal, where each new customer got me another quarter of being able to feed my family), and because we’re a software company our biggest expense is people, not servers or facilities.

As with the best investment deals, we’re almost as excited about the investors as we are about the money – Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers are just about the best there is out there, and Kevin Compton — who was already an investor (through his own firm, Radar Partners) but now will be joining the board — has a long and storied history of building and helping to build great companies.  I’ve been working with Kevin over the last year, and I’m entirely thrilled to be able to work even more closely with him, and to begin trying to understand this whole actually-running-a-business thing.

How does the News Affect our Users and Community?

You’ll see me out in the wild talking about why we took this money, but it all boils down to one thing:  Funding software development.  Most of that software will be open source, but some of it will definitely be commercial.  No, our investors aren’t making us do anything; this is our strategy and always has been, the investors are just helping us get it done.  We want to build a great company producing great software, and to do that we need to make money.  Turns out, selling software is actually a great way to make money.

I’ve never really thought of us as an open source software company, even though all of our software has been open source; I just think of us as a software company with a preference for open source.  We’ll be opening everything we can, but we also need to find a way to make enough money to pay the developers that produce that software, and we need to be able to fund speculative efforts and projects that take a long time to pay off, both of which are very hard when relying entirely on the services model that 100% open source usually dictates.

Note that we won’t be following an open core model – our open source software, including Puppet, will always stand on its own and be completely sufficient for nearly everyone.  There are, however, companies who have specialized needs, and we’ll be providing targeted applications at some of these companies.  In general, though, you’ll see us putting products out and trying out revenue models, and just generally experimenting and innovating in both software and business.  We think we have some great ideas, but we’re under no illusions that we know what we’re doing.

Get Involved

We hope everyone in the community will stick around for the next trip around the roller coaster, and we’ll be making sure we continue to spend some of our ill-gotten gains on increasing involvement and getting more user interaction.  You can always email me directly at luke@puppetlabs.com – and heck, you can usually just call me at +1-503-575-9774, although maybe not this crazy week. :)  And if you or someone you know is interested in moving out here to awesome Portland, OR and working with us to build the next generation data center stack, let us know.  We’ve got a few jobs posted now, but we’ll be adding quite a few more in the near future.

We’re sad to announce that our Product Manager, Michael DeHaan, has decided to take up a new role .  Michael came on board as Puppet Labs began to expand and has been criss-crossing the country evangelizing Puppet and talking to customers and community. Unfortunately for us he’s got an offer he couldn’t refuse, outside of open source software (gasp!), and a bit closer to home.  We’re really sorry to see him go and we wish him good luck on his next endeavor.

So we’re excited to announce that the 2.6 release is nearly ready and we’ll be putting out a beta release shortly.  It’s taken longer than we’d planned but the end result is packed full of new features and functionality.  We’re really excited about some of those features and where they’ll allow you to take Puppet.

As there are so many new features we’d like to begin to introduce you to some of the new hotness in 2.6 in the form of a series of introductory blog posts.  Posts written by the people who’ve been involved in producing and bringing those features to life.

We’ll be covering the replacement of the last XMLRPC components of Puppet with a full REST API and introduce you to that API.  We’ve got an exciting new construct called “run stages” that will better allow you to order and structure your Puppet runs, a new relationship syntax to make it faster and easier for you to specify the relationships between your  resources and the much anticipated introduction of hashes in the Puppet DSL.  We’ll also cover some cool additional language features that will make it easier for you to write your manifests – including our new Ruby DSL.

We’ve also done a lot of work in the core of Puppet to make it easier to work with your configuration data including enhancing how Puppet reports on what it does, adding more audit capabilities and helping you export information about your environment.

Finally, we’ve even redesigned the command line interface to allow you to use just the puppet binary to interact with all of Puppet’s functionality.

So look out for these upcoming posts and for the forthcoming release!