Today is a very big day for me.

Today is my last day at Puppet.

Puppet has been a huge part of my life for almost 7 years. It all started way back in 2011, when I was working at Simply Business. We’d just done a big shift to continuous deployment. We had a fully working deployment pipeline, but our ops workflows were starting to creak a bit at the seams. We started a new project to start managing the sytems with Puppet in an agentless model, and I was hooked.

From there I went on to do DevOps-y consulting at Kainos, working on a number of UK government projects, including the one I’m most proud of, the UK’s Register to Vote app: gov.uk/register-to-vote

And from there, I ended up in the belly of the beast: working for Puppet itself.

For three years, I saw how the sausage was made. I wrote Puppet code at banks, startups, retail sites, universities, ISPs and chip manufacturers to name a few. I was there for the PuppetLabs to Puppet name change, the big shift of the release of Puppet 4 (as well as 5! But it was less of a big deal…) and for Puppets new Tasks and Pipeline products.

I’ll never forget the folks I worked with, the community that was so warming and welcoming and the thousands of lines of Puppet code I wrote. But today is my last day, after 3 years of all that.

Because I’m off to work at HashiCorp! I’m super excited about it, as Vagrant was the other project that revolutionised my ops workflow way back in 2011. I still think that Vagrant is one of the most important projects to close the Dev-Ops gap. Having a way of replicating your operational environment in a repeatable fashion has probably saved thousands of hours of debugging pain over the years.

But don’t worry. I won’t be breaking off from Puppet completely: I still run Puppet at home, I still have modules that I actively work on and I still think it’s the best config management tools out there.

But I’ll probably be writing a lot more about Terraform, Consul, Vault and Nomad from now on.

I’m looking forward to the new opertunities that HashiCorp will bring!