BarCamp/Puppet HackDay Delhi: Automate Your Systems!

What is PuppetHackDay?

Puppet HackDay Delhi: Automate Your Systems! is a fun, interactive, collaborative and semi-competitive event centered around systems automation, spotlighting Puppet.  Puppet is the model-based configuration and systems management tool that's exciting sys admins and Ruby enthusiasts everywhere. But if you love systems automation (or the idea of it), we're also keen to mix it up with practitioners of cfengine, chef, etc. - anything you can download onto an EC2 instance.

Why You Should Come To This:

You've been building a lot of web app servers by hand over and over, thinking 'There has to be a better way….'

Or, you've been wrangling with an infrastructure with 3 different OS's, multiple competing business units who all want you to  build machines their way, yet scale twice as fast….

Or, you've just been needing to secure your systems in spec any way you can, challenged by a diverse ecology of users and jobs that will always be growing more complex….

Puppet HackDay Delhi can help.  Whether you're trying systems automation for the first time, or want to do more advanced projects communing with other operations folks who've been around the block, this is the place to be!

The day's goals are:

•  to give newcomers the opportunity to learn Puppet in a collaborative environment (with a two-hour guided exercise on EC2 machines that we will provide)
•  to apply that knowledge in a one-day competition immediately following the exercise, on the same machines (or on other machines if you like), or apply the principles in the systems automation tool of your choice, i.e. Puppet, cfengine, chef, lcfg, bcfg2
• develop the community of like-minded senior operations professionals focused on furthering the promise of systems automation - and the profession

Working on automating existing projects is perfectly acceptable (and a good way to rapidly bootstrap your team into using puppet!). Systems professionals who are experienced in Puppet an cfengine will be available for coaching and troubleshooting.

This event is open to any programmers or systems operations people who are reasonably comfortable with Linux/Unix and want to take their skills to the next level.

For those who don't know, Puppet is a way of automating system configuration so that your systems are created exactly the way you specify every time, and stay the way you want them. If you are responsible for administering systems, then Puppet and systems automation will change your life! It gets sysadmins out of the business of making changes on individual servers and lets them work at a higher level: at the specification for classes of servers across varied, heterogeneous infrastructures that scale. Hundreds of puppet scripts have already been written and publicly shared on reductivelabs.com and elsewhere, which means that the configuration scripts you need might already be written and waiting for you!

If you haven't used Puppet before that is perfectly fine. Most of the participants have never used puppet before, so you won't be at a disadvantage. Many participants plan on using Amazon EC2 instances that will be provided for the event.  So this will be an excellent opportunity to learn how to get started using Puppet with minimal overhead in a supportive (yet semi-competitive) environment. By the end of the weekend you should be up and running with Puppet and able to use it in your personal or professional work with confidence! You'll also be connected to the puppet community in Delhi. We'll set up a mailing list for the event so that people can keep in touch and help each other as they continue on their journey with Puppet.

When

Saturday, 13th March 2010 and Sunday, 14th March 2010

Where

SlideShare New Delhi office (221, First Floor,, Okhla Phase III,New Delhi-110020)

Directions : Come to the Modi Mill Compound in Okhla Phase III and ask for the Mercedes Benz showroom; our office is two buildings away from the showroom.

When you enter our building ask for Uzanto on the first floor (thats the name of our company... most people do not know the name SlideShare :)

Agenda

Day 1 (9th Jan 2010)

    •    Start at 10.30AM

    •    15 mins talk by Jonathan Boutelle: the business case for puppet

    •    15 mins talk by Julie Tsai: why Puppet will change your life

•    Training Exercise: 11AM - 1PM

    •    Lunch: 1PM - 2PM

    •    Hack: from 2PM onwards

    •    Dinner: 8PM - 9PM

Day 2 (10th Jan 2010)

    •    Breakfast: 9AM - 9.30AM

    •    1 hour left warning at 11AM

    •    Hack ends at 12PM

    •    Lunch: 1PM - 2PM

    •    Setup for demoes: 2.30PM - 3.30PM

    •    Working demoes - 15 mins max for each one: 3.30PM - 5PM

    •    Results & Prize distribution: 6PM

Signup / Teams

To signup to this event leave your name in the list below.  If you are already in a team then let us know that (maximum team size 2 people).  Otherwise you can join up with a tema1 team can submit as many hacks as they want. Prizes will be given to winning teams.

(please leave names of all team members, plus an email address or blog/website).

Julie Tsai (julie@slideshare.com)

Vineet Sharma (vineet@slideshare.com)

Mayank (mayank@slideshare.com)

Kapil Mohan (kapil@slideshare.com)

Mani Kumar (mani@slideshare.com)

Judges

Jon Boutelle (CoFounder & CTO, SlideShare) and Amit Ranjan (CoFounder & COO, SlideShare)

Prizes

STILL WORKING OUT DETAILS

If two people are on a team, they will each get a prize.

Useful Links

http://reductivelabs.com/trac/puppet

Connect

IRC: Join #puppethackday room at chat.slideshare.net:46664

Mailing List: http://groups.google.com/group/puppetcampdelhi (puppetcampdelhi@googlegroups.com)

Twitter Hashtag: #hadoophackday