Puppet was great about 10-12 years ago. It made the management of hundreds of VMs a breeze. Thank you Puppet Labs!<p>But the time of VMs has passed for most companies and by now there are better solutions available, so it makes sense to sell this off as long as it's worth something.<p>Not sure why this announcement was called an Open Letter?
This is a weird "open letter" but okay.<p>I feel like Puppet, for whatever reason, has lost out on things and Ansible won, which is quite unfortunate as Ansible is just not as good as Puppet. I wonder if Preforce will be able to revive the interest in Puppet.<p>Anyway, if someone plans to move away from Puppet (I imagine someone will, because someone always disagrees with a buyout), I've recently found mgmt[0] which has Puppet-lang compatibility. A big plus (to me anyway) is that it's not Ruby based, and is instead written in Go.<p>[0] <a href="https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt</a>
This leaves CFEngine as the last OG independent configuration management vendor:<p>Saltstack - acquired by VMWare<p>Ansible - acquired by Red Hat<p>Chef - acquired by Progress software
This blogpost is as unnecessarily complicated as Puppet codebase.<p>I hate working on Puppet codebase, it is so fragile and too easy to write spaghetti.
God this is just <i>awful</i>.<p>If your <i>Open</i> letter needs a FAQ at the end, you might as well start with the FAQ.<p>I am now reading this letter the <i>third</i> time. I dont hold anything against Puppet or Perforce. But this letter, there is something about this letter, and dare I say whether it was the PR or its CEO who wrote it, really irritates me.
"Perforce" is not mentioned until the fifth paragraph.<p>When writing a document like this, open with your most important statement. For example: Title: "Perforce Acquires Puppet." Then, "We are announcing that Perforce acquired Puppet. When I started at Puppet three years ago..."<p>There. Was that too hard?
Perforce is owned by two private equity companies. The ownership is split 50-50 between Clearlake Capital and Francisco Partners. It looks like PEs invest in Perforce and use them to acquire smaller companies in the dev tools area. Perforce owns Selenium and RogueWave Software. I wouldn't be surprised if they become a public company at some point so the PE can cash on their investment.
I’m not a cloudy/devops guy. I work on the realms that are mostly not cloudy. I figured puppet was some sort of enterprisey thing, but just know it “as one of those names.”<p>Anyway, I read through the first 3 paragraphs and still had no clue what puppet actually does/provides. But I knew that they had a leader, and that leader could use lots of big businessy words.<p>Curious why this is uptrending on HN. Do lots of people here use this? Usually ally this crowd goes more for the tech talk stuff.
Given this announcement I feel like I kinda have my answer.<p>But I have to wonder how popular Puppet is now? I used it extensively... 6 years ago? somewhere in that range. I don't remember for sure. I went to training and though it worked pretty well. I remember there being a lot of excitement around Puppet.<p>But since then I have moved more into AWS, with docker and serverless. Now I know as much as AWS and Docker love to claim otherwise... there is a large portion of companies that have not moved to this type of infrastructure.<p>So I am legitimately curious where they stand. Now I have to imagine if I was ever in a situation where I needed to build a machine/image I would use Packer or EC2 Image Builder (I think that's the name).
I thought it was only who didn't understand this letter. As an open letter it's confusing, as an announcement it doesn't look like so, well it's just not well written.
Puppet is one of those tools I refuse to use unless there's absolutely no other way to get something done. Mutable state is an anti pattern. Immutable versioned artifacts are the way.
They seem to have given their blog post a pretty weird title. An open letter is usually a complaint, with an invitation for the general public to join in. This seems to be more of an announcement that they were acquired.<p>The whole time I was reading it, I was expecting a "but this acquisition is actually bad because <reasons that indicate something generally toxic about the industry>."<p><a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/open%20letter" rel="nofollow">https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/open%20letter</a>
Puppet has to be one of the worst peices of software I've ever used. The language is full of terrible ideas (lets get rid of loops since those confuse sysadmins and make the only replacement require combinators via the goofy custom functions) and the documentation is full of broken links. Hira data always leaves you guessing at what a value actually is. It's like JS, you <i>can</i> make it work but it requires a ton of discipline and effort and is just ridiculous.<p>If you need to write unit tests for your deployment automation then you might be over complicating it.