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In this sponsored episode of RedMonk Radio, I talk with Karl Pietri of Slideshare, along with Luke Kanies and Andrew Shafer of Reductive Labs. We discuss how Slideshare uses Puppet to manage all of it’s data-centers, spread across geographies, their own on-premise servers, and the cloud via Amazon EC2.

First, we go over the Slideshare architecture (a Ruby on Rails shop) and how that drives the layout of the data-center. Karl then tells us how Puppet is used to manage the different servers, highlighting how they use it for private/public cloud mixing. On this point, I ask Andrew to compare Slideshare’s use with others in the Puppet community.

Getting down the to the day-to-day operations, we spend the last part of the show talking about how Puppet fits into Slideshare’s release management (via SVN) and how it’s effected the relationship between development and operations.

Finally, we wrap up with a semantic-check on the word “pager”: are sys admins still running around with beepers still?

Disclosure: Reductive Labs is a client and sponsored this podcast.