Luke Kanies - Reductive Labs
Founder
Speaking Topic: Using Puppet to Manage Your Network

Luke has been publishing and speaking on his work in Unix administration since 1997. He has focused on tool development since 2001, developing and publishing multiple simple sysadmin tools and contributing to established products like Cfengine. He founded Reductive Labs in 2005 as a response to the stagnation in sysadmin tools, to be a vehicle for changing the way we interact with and manage our computers. He is currently focused on Puppet, an open-source automation framework written in Ruby, and he is always researching and developing new ways to make it easier to talk to computers on your terms. He has presented on Puppet and other tools around the world, including at OSCON, LISA, Linux.Conf.au, and FOSS.in.

Abstract

Puppet is a system administration framework, written entirely in Ruby and capable of scaling from managing symlinks and Subversion checkouts in your home directory up to managing networks of hundreds or thousands of machines. This talk will cover the most important design patterns and data flows in the Puppet world and how these can enable you to teach your computers to do the work instead of you. Puppet is useful for more than just large-scale centralized administration, though, so we will also discuss some less common uses for it.