Today's companies are deploying and running more computer servers than ever before.
This is thanks in part to rise of virtualization and cloud computing, which makes it possible to create large numbers of servers without buying hardware, but it also stems from the growing demand for big data applications like Hadoop that require the help of hundreds or even thousands of machines.
The rub is that all these servers have put new pressures on the system administrators tasked with keeping them up and running around the clock.
To deal with the pressure, admins are turning to automation tools that make server administration more like software development. They're also learning to work more closely with software developers, who are now under pressure to update their code more frequently -- without introducing new bugs or crashing the servers. These twin trends -- automation and close collaboration between developers and IT operations -- are collectively referred to as the DevOps movement.
Puppet Labs is the company behind Puppet, an open source tool that can be used to automatically configure hundreds or even thousands of servers at once using simple scripts. It's popular with DevOps teams, but has always leaned a little bit heavier to the ops side than the dev side. Puppet Labs is addressing that gap by acquiring Cloudsmith, a company that makes developer tools based on Puppet.
"The problem is that there's often a big gap between when developers think their code is done and when it's actually ready to be used in production," explains Luke Kanies, the founder and CEO of Puppet Labs.
In many cases, an application depends on additional software that needs to be installed on the server in order to run correctly. Cloudsmith's focus is on making sure every application has everything it needs to run. Cloudsmith's flagship product is Stack Hammer, a hosted tool for managing software dependencies and deploying "stacks" of applications to cloud servers from the code hosting service GitHub or any other Git-based server.
Cloudsmith originally planned to build Stack Hammer from scratch, Kanies explains. But when the developers discovered Puppet, they realized they could actually use it as the basis for their own product. The company also makes an open source development environment called for creating Puppet scripts called Geppetto.
Kanies says Puppet Labs will continue to develop and support both Geppetto and Stack Hammer. Cloudsmith has offered Stack Hammer for free thus far, but the acquisition could expand the number of products and services offered by Puppet Labs, which already sells Puppet services and support and a premium version of the application called Puppet Enterprise. The company competes with other configuration management companies like CFEngine, Opscode and SaltStack.
Cloudsmith's staff are spread out across the world, from Sweden to the Czech Republic to North America, and they'll remain distributed. "Our VP of engineering, Brian Stein, just joined us from Red Hat, where he's used to managing distributed teams, so this won't be a problem at all," says Kanies. But he says Puppet Labs, which is based in Portland, Oregon, will also open an office in Prague, Czech Republic.
