IT Management & Cloud Podcast #45 – Velocity 2009 Special, w/Andrew Shafer

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During the second night of Velocity, in the piano-filled sunken lounge of the Fairmont Hotel, John and I talk with Reductive Lab‘s Andrew Shafer, who walked up just in time to be the guest for this episode.

We start out talking about Reductive Lab’s big news of the day, getting $2,000,000 in funding. Andrew tells us what Reductive Labs plans are for the moment: working on some additional offerings on-top of Puppet that have been wanting for awhile and, as with all newly funded open source companies, focusing on the community.

We then turn Velocity itself as I ask Andrew and John what they’ve seen and liked at the conference so far. This gets us into a conversation about what a “traditional” enterprise operations guy would think of this Velocity. As I put it, it’d be fun to do an “Alice in Wonderland” with one of these operations guys and see what they thought about the high-scale, web operations focus of the conference.

Latching on another trend, we discuss how the web operations folks at Velocity seem to have less silos in their “IT departments” (groups of 3-10 folks, usually) and how “doing everything” effects the approach and tools vs. traditional enterprise organizations.

We discuss some of the other tidbits from the conference sessions of the day: focusing on queueing more, the mythical flickr provisioning systems, etc.

I then try to extract some other IT Management items from Andrew, but, having focused on Reductive Labs of late, he’s got nothing. So I ask him how he keeps up with IT Management news now-a-days. In place of RSS feeds, he uses Twitter. This gets us into a discussion of the efficacy of RSS vs. Twitter vs. both and so on.

Catching up on the news since Thursday, we mention the RightScale and Hyperic/SpringSource partnership. I then briefly go over the AccelOps launch from today.

We wrap-up by talking about the rest of the week, where we think we’ll be moving into “the dry-cleaning cloud” at Structure.

Disclosure: Reductive Labs, SpringSource, and AccelOps are clients. As is IBM.