OStatic

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.