John Willis, one of the founders of Gulf Breeze Software (an IBM Tivoli consulting house,) met up with Luke Kanies and interviewed him about Puppet.

In addition to lots of insightful commentary on how Puppet is constructed, and a nice compare/contrast with how Tivoli is built (and you would be hard pressed to talk to someone who knows more about how Tivoli is built than John Willis, I expect,) there is also a section about iLike and HJK:

Uncomfortable with his recent celebrity at conferences, Luke told me that he has difficulty measuring his successes because he has his head so deep in the development and services of Puppet. One of his better success stories is with iLike.com, a website that allows users to download and share music. When iLike created one of the first Facebook applications, it grew from about ½ million users to over 6 million in a week. Luke, being the entrepreneur that he is, asked how iLike planned to manage that growth. He discovered that a services company in Seattle was managing iLike.com’s infrastructure build out using Puppet. In fact, one of the owners of that company told Luke that he makes a healthy living installing Puppet. Luke admitted that he felt feel pretty good to know that other people can make a living from his product.

Well, Luke, we feel pretty good about the fact that we make a living with your product too. :)

Puppet enables us to get a huge jump-start on building automated, scaleable, easy to manage infrastructures for our clients. Using puppet, we:

1. Automate as much of the routine systems administration tasks as possible.
2. Get 10 minute unattended build times from bare metal, most of which is data transfer. Puppet takes it the rest of the way, getting the machines ready to have applications deployed on them. It’s down to two and a half minutes for Xen.
3. Bootstrap our clients production environments while building their development environment. I can’t stress how cool this really is. Because we are expressing the infrastructure at a higher level, when it comes time to deploy your production systems, it’s really a non-event. We just roll out the Puppet Master and an Operating System auto-install environment, and it’s finished.
4. Cross-pollinate between clients with similar architectures. We work with several different shops using Ruby on Rails, all of whom have very similar infrastructure needs. By using Puppet in all of them, when we solve a problem for one client, we’ve effectively solved it for the others. I love being able to tell a client that we solved a problem for them, and all it’s going to cost is the time it takes for us to add the recipe.

Puppet, today, is a tool that is good enough to handle the vast majority of issues encountered in building scalable infrastructures. Even the places where it falls short are almost always just a matter of it being less elegant than it could be, and the entire community is working on making those parts better.

Thanks, Luke.