Bonum Certa Men Certa

Puppet Attracts Millions in Investment

Puppet Labs



Summary: A short Puppet interview delivered upon the news about a multi-million-dollar investment

Puppet is a Free/open source software tool which is used by many companies. I rely on it heavily at work. As we recently covered the release of a Puppet book we decided to also celebrate the news about Puppet Labs getting more funding. We spoke to Luke about the news and here are his answers.



1. Congratulations on the news, Luke. How long was this under negotiation and who was the initiator?

Luke: The investment was negotiated quite quickly. We had multiple outside investors who were interested in initiating a round, but our existing investors were excited enough about Puppet Labs that they proposed a deal we were happy with before we had talked to more than a couple outside investors.

2. At what capacity does Google use Puppet in-house to the best of your knowledge?

Luke: Google has published that they use Puppet on thousands of hosts in their corporate IT, but they don't publish specific numbers. Their installation is rare in that it primarily uses Puppet to manage workstations and laptops, as opposed to servers.

3. What will the news mean to existing users of Puppet?

Luke: It means we've got the resources to continue focusing on improving our product while we grow our sales and marketing teams, to enable us to bring Puppet to a wider group of users.

"Cisco has not yet gone public as a user of Puppet," explained to us the PR agent of Puppet Labs, "so we cannot explicitly state that Cisco uses Puppet, but I can give you a bit of background on Puppet and Cisco: Cisco is a great fit for Puppet because the demographic is a nearly-perfect overlap consisting of network admins and sysadmins, and Cisco has a lot of management issues that Puppet can help solve. Cisco is moving into virtualization and knows the Puppet infrastructure very well."

Here is the press release (November 29th, 2011).




Puppet Labs Raises $8.5M in Series C Funding



Cisco, Google Ventures, and VMware Join Kleiner Perkins, True Ventures, and Radar Partners To Build On Market Success and Accelerate Growth

PORTLAND, OR - NOVEMBER 29, 2011 - Puppet Labs, the leading provider of IT automation software for system administrators, today announced the closing of $8.5 million in Series C financing to further accelerate the company’s already strong growth and customer success. New investors Cisco, Google Ventures and VMware join existing investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, True Ventures, and Radar Partners. With the $8.5 million investment, Puppet Labs has now raised a total of $15.75 million.

The funding caps off a pivotal year for the company, which now boasts more than 250 customers including Zynga, Twitter, NYSE, Disney, Citrix, Oracle/Sun, Constant Contact, Match.com, Shopzilla, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Stanford University. In January, Puppet Labs expanded beyond its open source roots and announced Puppet Enterprise, the first commercial version of Puppet™, the powerful yet easy-to-use IT automation solution for system administrators. In March, the company was chosen by AlwaysOn as one of the “OnDemand Top 100” winners.

In September, Puppet Labs announced Puppet Enterprise 2.0 at its annual user conference, PuppetConf. Puppet Enterprise 2.0, the primary driver of business growth, has opened new markets for Puppet Labs in making the provisioning, configuring, and managing of virtualized and cloud infrastructure dramatically easier for system administrators.

In October, The Wall Street Journal noted that the demand for IT professionals with “Puppet skills” had tripled over the previous 12 months. This year has also seen Puppet Labs’ community grow beyond North America and Europe, with user groups and meet-ups sprouting worldwide, including in China, India, and Japan. Puppet Labs has also continued to grow its partner ecosystem such that it now offers integrations with VMware, Amazon Web Services, Cisco, OpenStack, Eucalyptus, RightScale, Zenoss, to name a few.

“The participation of these new investors in this latest round reinforces our lead in providing powerful IT automation tools for system administrators, whether deploying applications on-premise or in the cloud,” said Luke Kanies, CEO of Puppet Labs. “Together, we are well-positioned to enable IT organizations to fully capitalize on the tectonic shifts of virtualization and cloud computing in their delivery of business results.”

About Puppet Labs

Puppet Labs, Inc. was founded in 2005 and shipped the first release of the open source Puppet Project later the same year. The popularity of Puppet Labs’ IT automation solution has since grown to where it is now responsible for managing millions of nodes across thousands of organizations, both on-premise and in the cloud, including Zynga, Citrix, Shopzilla, Match.com, Oracle/Sun, to name a few. Now numbering sixty employees and based in Portland, Oregon, Puppet Labs is backed by Cisco, Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Radar Partners, True Ventures, and VMware.

Recent Techrights' Posts

Punching People Doesn't Work
It makes nobody any safer
This is How Microsoft's XBox and Entire Consoles (If Not Gaming) Ventures Will Ultimately Die
Ensure you can blame "Tariffs" (politics)? If not "hey hi", the fashionable go-to excuse when businesses fail?
The Complaint About Brett Wilson LLP - Part II - UK SLAPPs for Americans, SLAPPs for Profit
Brett Wilson LLP has a track record of this kind
Cloudflare Gives Us All Another Reason to Boycott Cloudflare
If Cloudflare wants to use its vast surveillance network (which is what it does as a CDN) to foist paywalls and maybe something worse (like DRM on top), then Cloudflare should be more widely rejected as a company
 
Lovers and Haters
Always beware hate preachers and demagogues (or how they frame issues or whose fault they distract from)
Focusing on What People Have in Common Instead of Killing and Cancelling One Another
Men and women of both "wings" stand to gain a lot by working together on common interests
'Cancel Culture' Isn't About Enforcing Ethics (and It's Done by People on the Right, Not "The Leftists")
Smarter folks would leave social control media
Russia's Attack on Europe (and NATO) Will Worsen Censorship and Corruption in Europe
Can we still debate issues that predate the invasion of Crimea?
Lawyers Should Permanently Lose Their Licence (and Worse) for Using Chatbots in Legal Work
They not only waste people's money and time. They pollute the literature with falsehoods. They commit perjury. [...] Brett Wilson LLP sent the Judge nearly 1,000 pages of material (mostly mine, copied without proper permission) shortly before a short Hearing, which lasted less than an hour
GAFAM and MATA (Mythical, Metaphor) as Explained by analognowhere.com
They're instruments of suppression that sponsor the oppressor
We've Already Mentioned Who Nowadays Funds Garrett's SLAPP Against Us (Not Garrett), Let's Examine Who Sponsored His Litigation Partner (Other Than Microsoft Salaries There's a Buddy of Bill Gates)
it's alleged that the Serial Strangler from Microsoft got money from him
Florian Müller: Using Software Patents to Attack Software Developers, Agitate Against Patent Reform
He also promotes attacks on the German Constitution and laws
Reliance on Typepad Seems to Have Doomed the Voice of Software Patents and Patent Maximalists in PatentDocs
Follow the money
UEFI 'Secure Boot' is Potential Mayhem to the Environment (Older and Leaner Distros Stop Working)
creating new problems, disguised as "solutions" to problems that do not exist
Sometimes 'Cancel Culture' Backfires Badly
There's no such thing as "too much" coverage
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, September 24, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, September 24, 2025
Links 25/09/2025: Jimmy Kimmel Returns to Air (With Limitations) and London Stansted Airport Latest to Have Incident (Fire)
Links for the day
Slopwatch: Fake Articles, SPAM With Slop, and Google News Directs People to Read Slopfarms
why does Google News insist on still linking to prolific slopfarms?
Gemini Links 25/09/2025: New Game for Gemini Protocol, Eleven, and Network Solutions Woes
Links for the day
Look Ma, No "Cloud"
So far this year we've had an almost perfect uptime
Links 24/09/2025: Autism Blame-Shifting and Typhoon Ragasa Enters China
Links for the day
Buying From Oneself is Not Business Success
This isn't at all a joking matter even if you already laugh at the whole thing because your pension, savings etc. are tied to this scam at some level
What They Really Hate David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) for
Nothing to do with code
Smart People Won't Buy 'Smart' Cars
Imagine trying to sell someone a house (proper home) while insisting that it'll need to be demolished 5 or 10 years later, then rebuilt again from scratch on the same vacant lot
The Relationship Between IBM Red Hat and Microsoft, Visualised
This metaphor goes a long way (projects, collaborations, and outsourcing
The Complaint About Brett Wilson LLP - Part III - Spying on Reporters' Families, Chaining Cases for Microsoft Employees Who Demand Censorship of Facts (Even Politely Expressed)
the time seems right to wrap up this introductory series
Links 24/09/2025: "NASA Moving Out of Entire Buildings as It's Gutted" and Purge of Online Critics (Opposing Fascism Becomes Unlawful)
Links for the day
Science is Under Attack
Oligarchy prefers a dumbed-down population
Someone Expiring Certificates on the Day of the 9/11 Attacks is Not Someone I Would Want Controlling My PC (or Deciding What's Authorised for Booting)
"social justice warriors"
The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) Has Reportedly Failed People With Wrong Advice
At the moment the SRA has a PR blunder
The Man Suing Brett Wilson LLP and Gervase de Wilde (5RB)
Now he's probably using the (almost) 200,000 pounds he's supposed to receive to sue Brett Wilson LLP and former colleagues/partners
More Microsoft-Red Hat Cross-Pollination as the Company Loses a Managing Director
some people move from Microsoft to Red Hat and some do the opposite
Slopwatch: A World Wide Web That's Rotting for Companies That Won't Even Exist in a Few Years
some of the junk Google News is promoting
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, September 23, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, September 23, 2025
Links 24/09/2025: Qt Creator 18 Beta, Microsoft Cannot Bail Out "ChatGPT" Anymore, China and US Intensify Censorship
Links for the day
Gemini Links 24/09/2025: Gemlogs and Politics
Links for the day
Links 23/09/2025: Japan Limits Uses of Skinnerboxes ('Smartphones') With Toxic "Apps", Fentanylware (TikTok) Tapped by "MAGAts"
Links for the day
Brett Wilson LLP Has Just Been Sued (by Their Own Clients!)
Vladimir and Alla Yanpolsky sued Brett Wilson LLP in BL-2025-001167 at the end of last week
Mayday: Optus emergency calling crisis
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Links 23/09/2025: Massive Data Breach, Slop Versus Productivity, and Vista 11 Update Breaks Things Again
Links for the day
Code of Censorship
Extortion is peace
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) Has Un-cancelled the Best People, Just in Time for the Big 4-0
Mr. Oliva should have been there all along (since 2019)
Most "Modern" Technology Makes You Slower and Dumber
Because proprietary software makes you worse off
"What Comes After Free Software?" Wrongly Insinuates We've Reached the Goal (Prison is Not the Goal)
The oil tycoons use similar tactics against environmentalists, giving them fake "wins"
Making More Work Space
I learned the hard way that less is more in circumstances where more means distraction
MAHA is a Lie, Public Officials Never Valued Citizens' Health (They Still Value Private Businesses, Their Sponsors)
Reject demagogues
Free Software Foundation (FSF) Has a New Press Kit for the Weekend After Next Weekend (40th Anniversary)
miles better than social [sic] media [sic] quips, moderated by narcissists and oil tycoons.
Microsoft Had Two Waves of Mass Layoffs This Month (That We Know of) and It'll Get Worse for Microsoft Soon
Will the axe fall again by month's end?
Gemini Links 23/09/2025: Happy Equinox, Photronic Arts, and Perception Cognition
Links for the day
Lessons We've Learned After 17 Years of American Hosting
GAFAM is "all-in" with the "Trump agenda"
Back to Normal Now, We Plan to Do More In-Depth Series (or Multi-part Stories)
Articles (or series thereof) that contain philosophy are important to us
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, September 22, 2025
IRC logs for Monday, September 22, 2025
Microsoft Media is Panicking Amid Mass Layoffs Every Month, H-1B Fees, and "Seattle’s Tech Scene in Trouble"
In "late stage Microsoft", copyleft becomes proprietary
The Next Wave of IBM/Red Hat Layoffs Being Discussed Already
Red Hat is sort of disappearing the way Tivoli did
New Techrights Turns 2
Today starts the third year of the SSG-based Techrights