Puppet's parent wins fresh funding

Sam Varghese
Wednesday, 24 June 2009 05:13

Business IT - Technology

Reductive Labs, the company behind Puppet, the open source configuration management system, has won funding to the tune of $US2 million, the company announced today.


The money will come from Silicon Valley-based True Ventures and others, according to Andrew Shafer, one of the three people who make up Reductive Labs, the others being chief developer and CEO Luke Kanies and chief operating officer Teyo Tyree.

Puppet can be used to manage small and large enterprise assets. It is principally UNIX-based and runs on GNU/Linux, OSX, HPUX, AIX, Solaris and all the BSDs. It is designed to  be able to automate the process of configuring a host.

There has been a renewed interest in free and open source software since the onset of the global economic crisis and Puppet is just the latest FOSS product to attract the interest of investors.

Shafer said the timing was, "because infrastructure is suddenly interesting to people. We're on target for 300-400 percent revenue growth for 2009 with a classic open source business model of support and service.

"We didn't pitch True Ventures so much as we found ourselves in a conversation where both parties were aligned. Cloud computing and virtualisation create a situation where the hardware investments and complexities are minimised, but the configurations that require management are actually multiplied.

"Puppet's model based approach to automation also provides a mechanism for moving services to and from a virtualised/cloud environment. The hype cycle of 'the cloud' provides interesting opportunities, which is one of the reasons we were able to attract attention from investors."

Reductive Labs will be relocating to Portland from its offices in Tennessee and Utah. Shafer will remain in Salt Lake City, while

Puppet is open source and has an Australian link in James Turnbull, a well-known figure in FOSS circles, who is employed by a large corporate in Melbourne. Turnbull has written an excellent guide called "Pulling Strings with Puppet: Configuration Management Made Easy.

During an interview a couple of months ago, he described Puppet this way: "Puppet is designed to be a low level of entry for your average systems administrator. Other from the domain specific language, they don't need to learn a new one, and the DSL's very simple. It contains some programmatic concepts, like if else statements and case statements and things like that, but broadly speaking, it's quite simple."