Andrew Clay Shafer is a contributor to Cutter Consortium's Agile Product & Project Management practice. He is broadly recognized as a major contributor to devops, having helped spread the body of knowledge now known by this name.

As cofounder of Puppet Labs, Mr. Shafer transformed the way people manage IT infrastructure. In particular, he popularized the concept of "infrastructure as code," which allows IT to reframe its processes to take advantage of methods proven greatly successful in Agile software development. Examples of such practices are summarized in Mr. Shafer's "Agile Infrastructure" chapter of the book Web Operations, which is considered a devops handbook.

Following his pioneering work at Puppet Labs, Mr. Shafer became Head of Engineering at Cloudscaling, where he focused on implementing cloud computing infrastructures for telcos and service providers, enabling them to provide carrier-class IaaS facilities to customers.

Mr. Shafer is frequently invited to present on Agile, operations, Ruby, systems management, and cloud topics. In addition to speaking at conferences dedicated to these subjects, he also likes to help organize them, including Agile Roots, Puppet Camp, Devops Days, and the New Horizons & New Voices stage at Agile 2011. He can be reached at consulting@cutter.com.