Michael DeHaan, Creator of Cobbler, Joins Reductive Labs as Product Manager for Puppet

Feb. 1, 2010 - PRLog -- Reductive Labs is excited to announce the hiring of Michael DeHaan as Product Manager for Puppet. Michael previously was the creator and architect of Cobbler at Red Hat as well as the community lead for that product.

Michael brings a strong background in open source software and community development to Reductive Labs. As the creator and community lead for Cobbler at Red Hat, Michael oversaw the growth of Cobbler, which is now used in thousands of datacenters across the world  -- including in the financial industry, hosting companies, render farms, grids, and universities. Cobbler is well known in the Enterprise Linux and Fedora space as the OS provisioning tool of choice for rapid deployment in medium to large-scale environments.   It is very frequently used in conjunction with Puppet to maximize flexibility and efficiency in rollouts of new machines, whether physical or virtual.

In addition to the growth of the use of Cobbler, Michael guided tremendous growth of the contributing community. The Cobbler project has had over 80 code contributors and many more community members that assist with testing, advocacy, ideas, and support.

Michael is a published contributor to http://magazine.redhat.com and has presented at such events as Red Hat Summit, Red Hat Cloud Forum, the Fedora Users and Developers Conference, HP Tech Forum, and local software events. Michael is also a contributor to over 50 US patent applications in the area of configuration management and datacenter automation.

“Puppet has accomplished something few open source projects achieve -- not only has Reductive Labs built a best of breed configuration management platform, it also has created a large and vibrant community of users and contributors that help guide its development,” said Michael about why he was joining Reductive Labs. “The future for Puppet's ecosystem is extremely promising, and I look forward to helping it evolve and grow further in the years to come. Whether we are talking about cloud architectures, virtualization, grid, or classical server rollouts -- as datacenter application deployment gets more complex, Puppet is around to help make the complicated simple and the impossible possible. For me, this is really one of the most exciting spaces in technology to be in, because not only can you help users all over the world solve their management challenges, but you also get to drive the forefront of computing.”

“We couldn’t be happier to add someone with the open source development and community credentials of Michael to our team,” said Luke Kanies, Founder and creator of Reductive Labs and Puppet. “Michael will help us identify opportunities to enhance the value of Puppet and engage further with our already strong and passionate community. We look forward to Michael helping guide the future of Puppet.”

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About Reductive Labs:

Based in Portland, OR, Reductive Labs provides next-gen IT automation, enabling IT organizations to manage infrastructure as code so they can provide higher service levels with less staff. Reductive Lab’s flagship offering, Puppet, significantly improves the automation and management of IT operations for large scale, fast growing, transaction-driven businesses, which are facing unprecedented cost pressures, reduced headcount, and increased support demands. Puppet’s knowledge-based approach creates an audit trail that delivers a new level of transparency so that IT teams can implement change more consistently, accurately and rapidly over the lifecycle of the systems. For more information, please visit www.reductivelabs.com.