We've written about Puppet, a long-standing open source tool for automating virtual machines and the management of them, several times. Built on the legacy of the Cfengine system, Puppet is increasingly being used in the fast-growing cloud computing space. It lets system administrators write "recipes" that specify machine functions and maintenance jobs that automate routine work. Now, Puppet's parent, Reductive Labs, has announced a $2 million Series A round of funding led by Silicon Valley-based True Ventures and other private investors. (Disclosure: True Ventures is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.) 

According to reports online today, and a release, Union Square Ventures, the venture firm that funded such names as Del.icio.us, FeedBurner, Etsy and Twitter, is investing $1.5 million in open source cloud computing service 10gen. 10gen's software stack is roughly comparable to Google App Engine "in that it provides a new stack of tools (database, grid management, application server) that are purpose-built to run in a cloud environment," according to the company. An alpha version of the company's platform SDK is available now as a free download.

This is the first of our weekly "Cloudy Saturday" columns that will delve into using cloud computing techniques to manage your own server farms, both large and small. This week we'll talk about the Puppet automation system from Reductive Labs. Puppet is built upon the legacy of the venerable Cfengine system, but takes things to a whole new level.