Puppet, the Portland, Oregon-based infrastructure automation company, announced a $40 million debt round today from BlackRock Investments.

CEO Yvonne Wassenaar says the company sees this debt round as part of a longer-term relationship with BlackRock . “What’s interesting, and I think part of the reason why we decided to go with BlackRock, is that typically when you look at how they invest this is the first step of a much longer-term relationship that we will have with them over time that has different elements that we can tap into as the company scales,” Wassenaar told TechCrunch.

In terms of the arrangement, rather than BlackRock taking a stake in the company, Puppet will pay back the money. “We’ve borrowed a sum of money that we will pay back over time. BlackRock does have a board observer seat, and that’s really because they’re very interested in working with us on how we grow and accelerate the business,” Wassenaar said.

Puppet has been in the process of rebuilding its executive team, with Wassenaar coming on board about 18 months ago. Last year she brought in industry veterans Erik Frieberg and Paul Heywood as CMO and CRO, respectively. This year she brought in former Cloud Foundry Foundation director Abby Kearns to be CTO.

All of these moves are with an eye to a future IPO, says Wassenaar. “We’re looking at how do we progress ultimately, ideally on a path to an IPO, and what is it going to take for Puppet to go through that journey,” she said.

She points out that in some ways, the pandemic has forced companies to look more closely at automation solutions like the ones that Puppet provides. “What’s really interesting is […] that the pandemic in many ways has put wind in our sails in terms of the need for corporations to automate and think about how they leverage and extend from a technology perspective going forward,” she said.

As Puppet continues to grow, she says that diversity is a core organizational value, and that while the company has made progress from a gender perspective (as illustrated by the presence of her and Kearns in the C Suite), they still are working at being more racially diverse.

“Where I believe we have a lot more work and there’s a lot more focus right now is further complementing that [gender diversity] from a racial perspective. And it’s an area that I have personally taken on, and I’m committed to making changes in the company as we go forward to support more racial diversity as well,” she said.

Previously the company had raised almost $150 million, with the most recent round being a $42 million Series F in 2018, according to Crunchbase data. The company previously took $22 million in debt financing in 2016, prior to Wassenaar coming on board.

Puppet, the Portland-based infrastructure automation company, today announced that it has named former Cloud Foundry Foundation executive director Abby Kearns as its new CTO.

Current Puppet CTO Deepak Giridharagopal will remain in his role and focus on R&D and leading new projects, while Kearns will focus on expanding the company’s product portfolio and communicating with enterprise audiences.

Kearns stepped down from her role at the Cloud Foundry Foundation earlier this month after holding that position since 2016. At the time, she wasn’t quite ready to reveal her next move, though, and her taking the CTO job at Puppet comes as a bit of a surprise. Despite a lot of usage and hype in its early days, Puppet isn’t often seen as an up-and-coming company anymore, after all. But Kearns argues that a lot of this is due to perception.

“Puppet had great technology and really drove the early DevOps movement, but they kind of fell off the face of the map,” she said. “Nobody thought of them as anything other than config management, and so I was like, well, you know, problem number one: fix that perception problem if that’s no longer the reality or otherwise, everyone thinks you’re dead.”

Since Kearns had already started talking to Puppet CEO Yvonne Wassenaar, who took the job in January 2019, she joined the product advisory board about a year ago and the discussion about Kearns joining the company became serious a few months later.

“We started talking earlier this year,” said Kearns. “She said: ‘You know, wouldn’t it be great if you could come help us? I’m building out a brand new executive team. We’re really trying to reshape the company.’ And I got really excited about the team that she built. She’s got a really fantastic new leadership team, all of them are there for less than a year. they have a new CRO, new CMO. She’s really assembled a fantastic team of people that are super smart, but also really thoughtful people.”

Kearns argues that Puppet’s product has really changed, but that the company didn’t really talk about it enough, despite the fact that 80% of the Global 5,000 are customers.

Given the COVID-19 pandemic, Kearns has obviously not been able to meet the Puppet team yet, but she told me that she’s starting to dig deeper into the company’s product portfolio and put together a strategy. “There’s just such an immensely talented team here. And I realize every startup tells you that, but really, there’s actually a lot of talented people here that are really nice. And I guess maybe it’s the Portland in them, but everyone’s nice,” she said.

“Abby is keenly aware of Puppet’s mission, having served on our Product Advisory Board for the last year, and is a technologist at heart,” said Wassenaar. “She brings a great balance to this position for us – she has deep experience in the enterprise and understands how to solve problems at massive scale.”

In addition to Kearns, former Cloud Foundry Foundation VP of marketing Devin Davis also joined Puppet as the company’s VP of corporate marketing and communications.

Update: we updated the post to clarify that Deepak Giridharagopal will remain in his role.

At the Open Infrastructure Summit, which was previously known as the OpenStack Summit, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth used his keynote to talk about the state of open-source foundations — and what often feels like the increasing competition between them. “I know for a fact that nobody asked to replace dueling vendors with dueling foundations,” he said. “Nobody asked for that.”

He then put a point on this, saying, “what’s the difference between a vendor that only promotes the ideas that are in its own interest and a foundation that does the same thing. Or worse, a foundation that will only represent projects that it’s paid to represent.”

Somewhat uncharacteristically, Shuttleworth didn’t say which foundations he was talking about, but since there are really only two foundations that fit the bill here, it’s pretty clear that he was talking about the OpenStack Foundation and the Linux Foundation — and maybe more precisely the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, the home of the incredibly popular Kubernetes project.

It turns out, that’s only part of his misgivings about the current state of open-source foundations, though. I sat down with Shuttleworth after his keynote to discuss his comments, as well as Canonical’s announcements around open infrastructure.

One thing that’s worth noting at the outset is that the OpenStack Foundation is using this event to highlight that fact that it has now brought in more new open infrastructure projects outside of the core OpenStack software, with two of them graduating from their pilot phase. Shuttleworth, who has made big bets on OpenStack in the past and is seeing a lot of interest from customers, is not a fan. Canonical, it’s worth noting, is also a major sponsor of the OpenStack Foundation. He, however, believes, the foundation should focus on the core OpenStack project.

“We’re busy deploying 27 OpenStack clouds — that’s more than double the run rate last year,” he said. “OpenStack is important. It’s very complicated and hard. And a lot of our focus has been on making it simpler and cleaner, despite the efforts of those around us in this community. But I believe in it. I think that if you need large-scale, multi-tenant virtualization infrastructure, it’s the best game in town. But it has problems. It needs focus. I’m super committed to that. And I worry about people losing their focus because something newer and shinier has shown up.”

To clarify that, I asked him if he essentially believes that the OpenStack Foundation is making a mistake by trying to be all things infrastructure. “Yes, absolutely,” he said. “At the end of the day, I think there are some projects that this community is famous for. They need focus, they need attention, right? It’s very hard to argue that they will get focus and attention when you’re launching a ton of other things that nobody’s ever heard of, right? Why are you launching those things? Who is behind those decisions? Is it a money question as well? Those are all fair questions to ask.”

He doesn’t believe all of the blame should fall on the Foundation leadership, though. “I think these guys are trying really hard. I think the common characterization that it was hapless isn’t helpful and isn’t accurate. We’re trying to figure stuff out.” Shuttleworth indeed doesn’t believe the leadership is hapless, something he stressed, but he clearly isn’t all that happy with the current path the OpenStack Foundation is on either.

The Foundation, of course, doesn’t agree. As OpenStack Foundation COO Mark Collier told me, the organization remains as committed to OpenStack as ever. “The Foundation, the board, the community, the staff — we’ve never been more committed to OpenStack,” he said. “If you look at the state of OpenStack, it’s one of the top-three most active open-source projects in the world right now […] There’s no wavering in our commitment to OpenStack.” He also noted that the other projects that are now part of the foundation are the kind of software that is helpful to OpenStack users. “These are efforts which are good for OpenStack,” he said. In addition, he stressed that the process of opening up the Foundation has been going on for more than two years, with the vast majority of the community (roughly 97 percent) voting in favor.

OpenStack board member Allison Randal echoed this. “Over the past few years, and a long series of strategic conversations, we realized that OpenStack doesn’t exist in a vacuum. OpenStack’s success depends on the success of a whole network of other open-source projects, including Linux distributions and dependencies like Python and hypervisors, but also on the success of other open infrastructure projects which our users are deploying together. The OpenStack community has learned a few things about successful open collaboration over the years, and we hope that sharing those lessons and offering a little support can help other open infrastructure projects succeed too. The rising tide of open source lifts all boats.”

As far as open-source foundations in general, he surely also doesn’t believe that it’s a good thing to have numerous foundations compete over projects. He argues that we’re still trying to figure out the role of open-source foundations and that we’re currently in a slightly awkward position because we’re still trying to determine how to best organize these foundations. “Open source in society is really interesting. And how we organize that in society is really interesting,” he said. “How we lead that, how we organize that is really interesting and there will be steps forward and steps backward. Foundations tweeting angrily at each other is not very presidential.”

He also challenged the notion that if you just put a project into a foundation, “everything gets better.” That’s too simplistic, he argues, because so much depends on the leadership of the foundation and how they define being open. “When you see foundations as nonprofit entities effectively arguing over who controls the more important toys, I don’t think that’s serving users.”

When I asked him whether he thinks some foundations are doing a better job than others, he essentially declined to comment. But he did say that he thinks the Linux Foundation is doing a good job with Linux, in large parts because it employs Linus Torvalds . “I think the technical leadership of a complex project that serves the needs of many organizations is best served that way and something that the OpenStack Foundation could learn from the Linux Foundation. I’d be much happier with my membership fees actually paying for thoughtful, independent leadership of the complexity of OpenStack rather than the sort of bizarre bun fights and stuffed ballots that we see today. For all the kumbaya, it flatly doesn’t work.” He believes that projects should have independent leaders who can make long-term plans. “Linus’ finger is a damn useful tool and it’s hard when everybody tries to get reelected. It’s easy to get outraged at Linus, but he’s doing a fucking good job, right?”

OpenStack, he believes, often lacks that kind of decisiveness because it tries to please everybody and attract more sponsors. “That’s perhaps the root cause,” he said, and it leads to too much “behind-the-scenes puppet mastering.”

In addition to our talk about foundations, Shuttleworth also noted that he believes the company is still on the path to an IPO. He’s obviously not committing to a time frame, but after a year of resetting in 2018, he argues that Canonical’s business is looking up. “We want to be north of $200 million in revenue and a decent growth rate and the right set of stories around the data center, around public cloud and IoT.” First, though, Canonical will do a growth equity round.

MySQL configuration management remains a hot topic, as I’ve noticed on numerous occasions during my conversations with customers.

I thought it might be a good idea to start a blog series that goes deeper in detail into some of the different options, and what modules potentially might be used for managing your MySQL database infrastructure.

Configuration management has been around since way before the beginning of my professional career. I, myself, originally began working on integrating an infrastructure with my colleagues using Puppet.

Why is configuration management important?

• Reproducibility. It’s giving us the ability to provision any environment in an automated way, and feel sure that the new environment will contain the same configuration.

• Fast restoration. Thanks to reproducibility, you can quickly provision machines in case of disasters. This makes sure you can focus on restoring your actual data instead of worrying about the deployment and configuration of your machines.

• Integral part of continuous deployment. Continuous deployment is a terminology everyone loves: being able to deploy changes rapidly and automatically after automated regression testing requires a configuration management solution.

• Compliance and security. Solutions like Puppet and Chef maintain and enforce configuration parameters on your infrastructure. This can sound bothersome at first, but it’s essential for maintaining a well-configured environment.

• Documented environment. Although reading someone’s puppet code can potentially harm you beyond insanity, it provides you with the real truth about your infrastructure.

• Efficiency and manageability. Configuration management can automate repetitive tasks (for example, user grants, database creation, configuration variables), as well as security updates, service restarts, etc. These can potentially bring you less work and faster rollouts.

Which players are active in this field?

The most popular open source solutions are Puppet, Chef, Ansible, and CFengine (among others). In this series, we will go deeper in the first three of them.

Let’s first start by giving you a quick, high-level introduction.

Puppet

Puppet is a language used to describe the desired state of an environment. The Puppet client reads the catalog of the expected state from the server and enforces these changes on the client. The system works based on a client/server principle.

Puppet has as default four essential components:

• Puppet Server: A Java virtual machine offering Puppet’s core services.
• Puppet Agent: A client library that requests configuration catalog info from the puppet-server.
• Hiera: A key-value lookup database, which can store and modify values for specific hosts.
• Facter: An application that keeps an inventory of the local node variables.

How can you integrate puppet in your MySQL infrastructure?

• A ready-made puppet module: https://forge.puppet.com/puppetlabs/mysql

This will allow you and your team to create users, databases, install and configure MySQL

• Use the community Luke: https://forge.puppet.com/modules?utf-8=?&sort=rank&q=mysql

Probably my old “code from hell” module is still somewhere out there.

Chef

Chef also consists of a declarative language (like Puppet) based on Ruby which will allow you to write cookbooks for potential integrable technologies. Chef is also based on a server/client solution. The client being chef nodes, the server managing the cookbooks, catalogs and recipes.

In short, Chef consists of:

• Chef server: Manages the multiple cookbooks and the catalog
• Chef clients (nodes): The actual system requesting the catalog information from the chef server.
• Workstations: This is a system that is configured to run Chef command-line tools that synchronize with a Chef-repository or the Chef server. You could also describe this as a Chef development and tooling environment.

How can you integrate Chef in your MySQL infrastructure:

• https://supermarket.chef.io/cookbooks/mysql

Ansible

Ansible originated with something different in mind. System engineers typically chose to use their own management scripts. This can be troublesome and hard to maintain. Why wouldn’t you use something easy and automated and standardized? Ansible fills in these gaps, and simplifies management of Ansible targets.

Ansible works by connecting to your nodes (by SSH default) and pushes out Ansible modules to them. These modules represent the desired state of the node, and will be used to execute commands to attain the desired state.

This procedure is different to Puppet and Chef, which are essentially preferably client/server solutions.

Some pre-made modules for MySQL are:

• http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/mysql_db_module.html
• http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/mysql_user_module.html
• http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/mysql_variables_module.html

Conclusion and Next Steps

Choose your poison (or magical medicine, you pick the wording), every solution has its perks.

Keep in mind that in some situations running a complicated Puppet or Chef infrastructure could be overkill. At this moment, a solution like Ansible might be a quick and easily integrable answer for you.

The next blog post will go over the Puppet Forge MySQL module, so stay tuned!

 Portland, Ore.-based DevOps company Puppet Labs today announced that it has secured a $22 million credit facility from Silicon Valley Bank.
In addition, the company today appointed former Genentech CFO Lou Lavigne to its board, where he will be the chairman of its audit committee — a critical role Puppet had to fill as it prepares for a future IPO. Read More

Founded in 2004 to help people find great local businesses, Yelp has some 135 million monthly unique visitors. With those traffic volumes Yelp’s 300+ engineers are constantly working to keep things moving smoothly – and when you move that fast you learn many things.

Fortunately for the global MySQL community, three Yelp DBAs will be sharing what they’ve learned at the annual Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo this April 13-16 in Santa Clara, California.

Say “hello” to Susanne Lehmann, Jenni Snyder and Josh Snyder! I chatted with them over email about their presentations, on how MySQL is used at Yelp, and about the shortage of women in MySQL.

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Tom: Jenni, you and Josh will be co-presenting “Next generation monitoring: moving beyond Nagios ” on April 14.

You mentioned that Yelp’s databases scale dynamically, and so does your monitoring of those databases. And to minimize human intervention, you’ve created a Puppet and Sensu monitoring ensemble… because “if it’s not monitored, it’s not in production.” Talk to me more about Yelp’s philosophy of “opt-out monitoring.” What does that entail? How does that help Yelp?

Jenni: Before we moved to Sensu, our Nagios dashboards were a sea of red, muted, acknowledged, or disabled service checks. In fact, we even had a cluster check to make sure that we never accidentally put a host into use that was muted or marked for downtime. It was possible for a well-meaning operator to acknowledge checks on a host and forget about it, and I certainly perpetrated a couple of instances of disks filling up after acknowledging a 3am “warning” page that I’d rather forget about. With Sensu, hosts and services come out of the downtime/acknowledgement state automatically after a number of days, ensuring that we’re kept honest and stay on top of issues that need to be addressed.

Also, monitoring is deployed with a node, not separate monitoring configuration. Outside of a grace period we employ when a host is first provisioned or rebooted, if a host is up, it’s being monitored and alerting. Also, alerting doesn’t always mean paging. We also use IRC and file tickets directly into our tracking system when we don’t need eyes on a problem right away.

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Tom: Susanne, in your presentation, titled “insert cassandra into prod where use_case=?;” you’ll discuss the situations you’ve encountered where MySQL just wasn’t the right tool for the job.

What led up to that discovery and how did you come up with finding the right tools (and what were they) to run alongside and support MySQL?

Susanne: Our main force behind exploring other datastores alongside MySQL was that Yelp is growing outside the US market a lot. Therefore we wanted the data to be nearer to the customer and needed multi-master writes.

Also, we saw use cases where our application data was organized very key-value like and not relational, which made them a better fit for a NoSQL solution.

We decided to use Cassandra as a datastore and I plan to go more into detail why during my talk. Now we offer developers more choices on how to store our application data, but we also believe in the “right tool for the job” philosophy and might add more solutions to the mix in the future.

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Tom: Jenni, you’ll also be presenting “Schema changes multiple times a day? OK!” I know that you and your fellow MySQL DBAs are always improving and also finding better ways of supporting new and existing features for Yelp users like me. Delivering on such a scale must entail some unique processes and tools. Does this involve a particular mindset among your fellow DBAs? Also, what are some of those key tools – and processes and how are they used?

Jenni: Yelp prizes the productivity of our developers and our ability to iterate and develop new features quickly. In order to do that, we need to be able to not only create new database tables, but also modify existing ones, many of which are larger than MySQL can alter without causing considerable replication delay. The first step is to foster a culture of automated testing, monitoring, code reviews, and partnership between developers and DBAs to ensure that we can quickly & safely roll out schema changes. In my talk, I’ll be describing tools that we’ve talked about before, like our Gross Query Checker, as well as the way the DBA team works with developers while still getting the rest of our work done. The second, easy part is using a tool like pt-online-schema-change to run schema changes online without causing replication delay or degrading performance

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Tom: Josh, you’ll also be speaking on “Bootstrapping databases in a single command: elastic provisioning for the win.” What is “elastic provisioning” and how are you using it for Yelp’s tooling?

Josh: When I say that we use elastic provisioning, I mean that we can reliably and consistently build a database server from scratch, with minimal human involvement. The goal is to encompass every aspect of the provisioning task, including configuration, monitoring, and even load balancing, in a single thoroughly automated process. With this process in place, we’ve found ourselves able to quickly allocate and reallocate resources, both in our datacenters and in the cloud. Our tools for implementing the above goals give us greater confidence in our infrastructure, while avoiding single-points of failure and achieving the maximum possible level of performance. We had a lot of fun building this system, and we think that many of the components involved are relevant to others in the field.

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Tom: Susanne and Jenni, last year at Percona Live there was a BoF session titled “MySQL and Women (or where are all the women?).” The idea was to discuss why there are “just not enough women working on the technology side of tech.” In a nutshell, the conversation focused on why there are not more women in MySQL and why so relatively few attend MySQL conferences like Percona Live.

The relative scarcity of women in technical roles was also the subject of an article published in the August 2014 issue of Forbes, citing a recent industry report.

Why, in your (respective) views, do you (or don’t) think that there are so few women in MySQL? And how can this trend be reversed?

Susanne: I think there are few women in MySQL and the reasons are manifold. Of course there is the pipeline problem. Then there is the problem, widely discussed right now, that women who are entering STEM jobs are less likely staying in there. These are reasons not specific for MySQL jobs, but rather for STEM in general. What is more specific for database/MySQL jobs is, in my opinion, that often times DBAs need to be on call, they need to stay in the office if things go sideways. Database problems tend often to be problems that can’t wait till the next morning. That makes it more demanding when you have a family for example (which is true for men as well of course, but seems still to be more of a problem for women).

As for how to reverse the trend, I liked this Guardian article because it covers a lot of important points. There is no easy solution.

I like that more industry leaders and technology companies are discussing what they can do to improve diversity these days. In general, it really helps to have a great professional (female) support system. At Yelp, we have AWE, the Awesome Women in Engineering group, in which Jenni and I are both active. We participate in welcoming women to Yelp engineering, speaking at external events and workshops to help other women present their work, mentoring, and a book club.

Jenni: I’m sorry that I missed Percona Live and this BoF last year; I was out on maternity leave. I believe that tech/startup culture is a huge reason that fewer women are entering and staying these days, but a quick web search will lead you to any number of articles debating the subject. I run into quite a few women working with MySQL; it’s large, open community and generally collaborative and supportive nature is very welcoming. As the article you linked to suggests, MySQL has a broad audience. It’s easy to get started with and pull into any project, and as a result, most software professionals have worked with it at some time or another.

On another note, I’m happy to see that Percona Live has a Code of Conduct. I hope that Percona and/or MySQL will consider adopting a Community Code of Conduct like Python, Puppet, and Ubuntu. Doing so raises the bar for all participants, without hampering collaboration and creativity!

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Thanks very much, Susanne, Jenni and Josh! I look forward to seeing you next month at the conference. And readers, if you’d like to attend Percona Live, use the promo code Yelp15 for 15% off! Just enter that during registration. If you’re already attending, be sure to tweet about your favorite sessions using the hashtag #PerconaLive. And if you need to find a great place to eat while attending Percona Live, click here for excellent Yelp recommendations.

The post Yelp IT! A talk with 3 Yelp MySQL DBAs on Percona Live & more appeared first on MySQL Performance Blog.

I’ll be attending Puppet Camp in San Francisco tomorrow and Friday. Come say hi if you’ll be there too!

Puppet Camp: Learn More About Open Source Data Center Automation | Puppet Labs.