Kelsey Hightower

until I left.

When I left Puppet, I built this tool called CompD, I went to go be a VP of engineering, and I got to write Go code.

So we started, rightfully so, we lifted all the Java heavy usage, and I earned the trust of the team, and we started rewriting some of the microservices in Go, shrinking our cloud footprint, and we sunsetted it and got it all into production, the Go code.

And I was like, we don't really need Puppet anymore.

And I open sourced this project called CompD, and it would pull variables from etcd and generate just enough config, just the parts of Puppet that I thought made sense.

And then Docker was out.

And then I was like, wow, we can probably stop moving Python files around.

We can probably package them up.

So to me, the big value of Docker at the time was previously I had definitely did the work to make RPMs for every app, even the custom apps.

RPMs are the Red Hat package management.

So if you're in a Red Hat system, you can do yum install nginx, yum install postgres, but most people...

Even today, don't package their third-party apps like the apps that a development team would write.

You're like, no, we just put CICD.

We'll copy them over there, maybe put them in a tarball.

But we usually never went to making official Debian packages or RBM packages.

But Puppet meant you didn't have to go through all of that work, and you could still end up with a package, something that was repeatable.

So all the stuff we used to do with Python and virtual int, all the things we used to do with Ruby gems and the virtual environments we have for that, we got rid of it.

We squished it all into a Docker container.

And you got rid of a lot of dev tooling.

So this is why I think it resonates so much with developers, because we cleaned up the mess of working on multiple projects.