Recently unveiled is DTO’s RunDeck which, in their words, is: RunDeck is open source software that helps you automate ad-hoc and routine procedures in data center or cloud environments. RunDeck provides a number of features that will alleviate time-consuming grunt work and make it easy for you to scale up your scripting efforts. To function RunDeck requires a list of hosts to manage and execute commands on. One of the sources it can use for this list of hosts is a configuration management tool like Puppet.

Myself and Jeff McCune have been working on Pro Puppet for quite a few months now. It’s the follow-up to Pulling Strings with Puppet that I wrote in 2007. It’s both an update on the original book and contains a lot of new content. We’ve tried to ensure that’s a practical guide and covers the new features introduced in 2.6.0 and later releases. It also covers a lot of scaling, workflow (for example environments), and an expanded section on writing your own functions, facts, types and providers.

I’m really excited to announce that my Puppet provisioner for Vagrant has been released in version 0.6.9. Vagrant is a tool for building and distributing virtualized development environments. The new provisioner allows you to provision Vagrant boxes using Puppet (previously Vagrant only supported Chef and variants). The initial provisioner uses stand-alone manifests run with the puppet binary and doesn’t use a Puppet server. I intend to write a Puppet client-server provisioner in the near future.

I did a guest post on a state of DevOps across at Agile Web Development & Operations blog. It contains discussion of DevOps, smoking, operations and occasional swearing.

So this post started off being about music and now maybe is not. I am well known for my generally terrible taste in music. I’m also noted for liking songs rather than artists - I frequently buy/download albums and only ever listen to the one or two tracks that I like. I find myself liking perhaps 10% of most artist’s material, if that. There are classic examples of this - the only Beach Boys song I like is “God Only Knows”.