Puppet Labs announced today that it closed $8.5 million in C-Seies funding with Google, VMware and Cisco as new investors. The investment brings Puppet’s total raised to $15.5 million. Its previous investors – Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, True Ventures and Radar Partners – are also participating in the new round. Puppet Labs sponsors the open source configuration management tool Puppet and sells its own Puppet Enterprise suite.

Puppet Labs has been extremely successful thus far, and the use of Puppet has been surging in the enterprise. Indeed.com has found that Puppet and Hadoop are two of the fastest growing job skills referred to in job postings.

DevOps is a movement which tries to bridge the gap between operations staff and developers.  It enables operations staff to apply agile methodology to systems administration. Tools like Puppet have become instrumental in that process, and Kanies says some job listings are using Puppet as sort of a shorthand for DevOps because they know Puppet users are more likely to bring a DevOps perspective to the table.  Interestingly, that’s similar to the way Amazon Web Services became a synonym for cloud for some time.

“People are using Puppet as sort of a synonym for DevOps,” said Puppet’s Founder and CEO Luke Kanies.

So how will Puppet Labs be using the additional funding?

Kanies says the funding will be invested in further developing Puppet Enterprise, with a focus on refining the user experience and leveraging the data the Puppet generates. “Data is critical for us, it’s a fundamental differentiator for Puppet,” says Kanies. He says they’re already doing a lot to put data in front of their customers, but promises they’ll be doing more in the future. “There’s still a lot of value to extract from this data.”

Kanies wants Puppet Labs to provide more tools for ensuring that your development environment is compatible to your production environment, and make it easier for DevOps teams to make these environments identical if they’re not. Puppet already has tools for querying an environment and auto-configuring servers, but he hopes this process can be made even easier. He also mentioned a compliance tool designed not just to verify compliance to monitor how it changes over time.

Asked whether this might bring Puppet Labs into competition with tools such as VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite, Netuitive or Nodeable, Kanies says that those tools are focused more on the application layer rather than the infrastructure. He says Puppet provides a great source of data to those tools.

Kanies also mentioned that some of the new funding will also be spent on sales and marketing. That’s where the new funders come in. Each of those companies really understands the Puppet Labs mission and are using Puppet themselves.

For example, Google is considered a pioneer of DevOps. Prior to joining Puppet Labs, Product Manager Nigel Kersten was a system administrator at Google where he managed Google’s own deployment of Puppet.

Kanies notes that Cisco acquired NewScale, a cloud deployment vendor that fits into the DevOps space. He points out that Cisco sells directly to infrastructure and operations teams. The investment from Cisco could be a great way to get Puppet Enterprise into more companies.

The investment from VMware makes the most sense. VMware launched its own line of DevOps tools recently, but none of them compete with Puppet. Kanies likened the rise of virtualization in production environments to the rise of configuration automation tools like Puppet. He also says that VMware “really gets” open source, saying that the company’s model for Cloud Foundry is very similar to Puppet Labs’ own approach to open source.

Puppet Labs competes with Opscode, a company that sponsors and commercializes Chef, an alternative to Puppet.

Here’s an excerpt from our interview with Kanies. Keep an eye out for a longer edit of the video, in which we discuss DevOps and cloud trends for 2012, the role of DevOps in managing big data and more.