The Configuration Management Summit and Training was part of USENIX Federated Conferences Week.
USENIX combines established conferences and new workshops into a week, chock full of research, trends, and community interaction. Customize the program to meet your needs.
New this year, your daily registration for the Configuration Management Summit and Training gets you into all the events happening those days: tutorials, talks, workshops—you name it. Plus, registration packages offer expanded discounts. The more days you attend, the more you save! The Configuration Management Summit and Training takes place at the Sheraton Boston Hotel.
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Thanks to those of you who joined us in Boston, MA, for the Configuration Management Summit and Training!
The Configuration Management Summit and Training was held in conjunction with the 2010 USENIX Federated Conferences Week, June 22–25, 2010. The Summit reports from ;login: are now online.
CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT SUMMIT
Thursday, June 24, 2010, 9:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.
The first Configuration Management Summit brought
together developers, power users, and new adopters of open source configuration
management tools for automating system administration. Configuration
management is a growth area in the IT industry, and open source solutions, with
cost savings and an active user community, are presenting a serious challenge to today's "big vendor" products.
9:00 a.m.–10:20 a.m. Presentations I
10:20 a.m.–10:40 a.m. Break
10:40 a.m.–Noon Presentations II
Noon–1:00 p.m. Summit Luncheon
1:00 p.m.–2:30 p.m. Panel Discussion
(questions proposed by attendees and answered by the participants)
- What do you consider your best success story?
- I am an ISP configuring mail servers that are different and I want to know why. Can your tool help me find out the difference?
- What is the one driving reason you would develop your own tool rather than using something that was already out there?
- At what point do I need a management tool for my management tools?
- What level of abstraction enables sharing? What kind of community sharing exists?
- How do solutions handle deployment of packages?
- What are the platform dependency issues that influence tools?
- What packages are required in order to install tools?
- What are your tool's weaknesses and what are you doing about them?
- What do tools offer with respect to configuration testing?
- What is the philosophy for upgrade/upgrade path for the tool itself?
- Who is the perfect person to hire to implement your tool?
2:30 p.m.–3:00 p.m. Break
3:00 p.m.–5:00 p.m. Barcamp! (presentations proposed on-site)
- Matt Richards, "Converting an Ad-Hoc Site to CM: The Story"
- Aaron Peterson, "Chef Demo"
- Michael DeHaan, "Cobbler: Automated OS Installs"
- David Pullman, "Cfengine: Complexities of Configuring Different Operating Systems"
- "Func — Attack!!! — Your Systems!!!"
SUMMIT ORGANIZERS AND ABSTRACTS
Alva L. Couch is currently an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Tufts. Prof. Couch is the author of many LISA papers and received LISA Best Paper awards in both 1996 and 2005. In 2003 he received the SAGE Outstanding Achievement Award for his contributions to the theory of system administration. He currently serves as Secretary of the USENIX Board of Directors.
For Bcfg2:
Narayan Desai will explain the motivation behind the design of Bcfg2, highlighting the key system management issues that led to its development. He will also describe its overall philosophy, as well as its simple and elegant model for configuration.
Narayan Desai is a researcher in the Mathematics and Computer Science
Division of Argonne National Laboratory, specializing in system software for
supercomputers. He is the project leader for Bcfg2. When not working on Bcfg2,
he spends time building large-scale experimental systems and developing new
supercomputing scheduling techniques. He is the author of the USENIX Short Topics in
System Administration booklet Configuration Management
with Bcfg2, co-authored with Cory Lueninghoener.
For Cfengine:
Mark Burgess will explain the motivation for Cfengine 3's all-new Promise
technology, which integrates patterns and knowledge management
with Cfengine's famous convergent automation. In addition to
commenting on some of the science behind Cfengine, Mark will show how
the new language idioms bring scalable simplicity, without the need
for coding. The talk will end with some remarks about how Cfengine uniquely
is addressing the two biggest IT challenges for the coming decade.
Mark Burgess is Professor of Network and System Administration at Oslo University College, Norway (a member of the EMANICS Network of Excellence) and CTO of Cfengine AS. He is the author of the configuration management system Cfengine and of several books and many papers on the topic, including the USENIX Short Topics in
System Administration booklet A System Engineer's Guide to Host Configuration and Maintenance Using Cfengine, co-authored with Æleen Frisch.
For Chef:
Aaron Peterson will speak on the Cambrian Cloud Explosion: what we now see as IT infrastructure and operations are moving into an unprecedented period of changes and innovation driven by the rise of abstract and fault-tolerant components, unlimited infrastructure, worldwide collaboration, and changes in intellectual property. He will survey key points in cloud computing history and early IBM ideas, travel through Google's implementation and Amazon Web Services, and continue with the state of the industry as it stands in 2010.
He will provide some insight and predictions for 2011, 2012, and beyond and will close the talk with some observations on what's happening to operations and configuration management in the wake of the explosion.
Aaron Peterson is a seasoned systems and networking engineer serving as
a Technical Evangelist for Opscode, the makers of Chef. He has applied
real-time command-line kung fu to tens of thousands of servers at once
and automated global production infrastructure at Amazon.com. He is
excited about information design and visualization, scale, and analysis.
For Puppet:
Michael DeHaan will be speaking on Puppet's declarative, model-driven,
and data-driven architecture and why these properties are critical in
a datacenter automation system, as well as about some of the general
philosophy behind why Puppet does the things the way it does. He will
also give an overview of recent developments in Puppet and some of the
more interesting places it is being deployed today.
Michael DeHaan is the Product Manager for Puppet Labs, the creators of
Puppet. Before joining Puppet Labs, Michael led provisioning
efforts in Red Hat's Emerging Technologies Group. Michael is the
creator of the Cobbler deployment server and also co-authored the Func
control framework. He lives in Raleigh, NC.
TUTORIAL: Configuration Management Solutions with Cfengine 3
Friday, June 25, 2010, 9:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.
Instructor: Mark Burgess, Cfengine, Inc.
Who should attend: Anyone with a basic knowledge of configuration management who is interested in learning the next-generation tool.
Following a complete rewrite of Cfengine with its popular new syntax
and powerful pattern matching capabilities, this full-day tutorial
presents an introduction suitable for new users, as well as for users of
Cfengine 2.
The tutorial is peppered with configuration examples, which can
now be self-contained and modularized to an unprecedented degree
in the new language.
Take back to work: An understanding of the new features of the completely rewritten Cfengine 3, including its new syntax and benefits.
Topics include:
- Moving from ad hoc scripts to automation
- The importance of convergence
- The Promise model
- Templates and data types
- Quickstart configuration
- Creating configuration libraries
- Upgrading from Cfengine 2
- Example configurations and demos
- Achieving compliance with standards and regulations
- Cfengine on Windows and the Registry
- Monitoring and self-healing
- Brief overview of the community and commercial Cfengine roadmap
Mark Burgess is Professor of Network and System Administration at Oslo University College, Norway (a member of the EMANICS Network of Excellence) and CTO of Cfengine AS. He is the author of the configuration management system Cfengine and of several books and many papers on the topic, including the USENIX Short Topics in
System Administration booklet A System Engineer's Guide to Host Configuration and Maintenance Using Cfengine, co-authored with Æleen Frisch.
Attendees, please note: If you join the tutorial late, we ask that you refrain from asking the instructor to review the material that you missed.
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