[ucc-announce] Tech Talk 0x08 - Configuration Management and the Death of System Administration

Sam Moore matches at ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au
Mon Aug 5 19:11:48 WST 2013


Luke Williams will present the next tech talk on Configuration Management 
using Puppet. You should go!

When: Tuesday 13th August 5:30pm
Where: UCC Clubroom
How Much: Free!

--
Configuration management and the death of system administration

Being a sysadmin is hard work. You maintain complex, changing systems
using an arcane library of command-line incantations to inspect and
modify elaborate configurations. Quick fixes congeal into messes of
dirty undocumented hacks. Repetitive tasks are traditionally automated
with scripts: sequences of commands where every line is a potential
point of failure that can leave the system in an unknown state to be
painstakingly resolved by hand.

Configuration management (CM) takes the mystery out of system
administration. Instead of explicitly listing steps that (hopefully)
result in the desired system state, a high-level description of the
desired state is processed by the CM platform to determine the steps
to reach it, using package adapters to reason about the current system
state and generate commands to alter it.

In this talk, I'll introduce Puppet, a mature configuration management
platform with adapters for thousands of server applications, and
Vagrant, an automatic VM provisioning tool that we can use with puppet
to effortlessly spin up new environments. We'll see how a single
command can rebuild an entire system, how version control makes
rolling back to a previous state as simple as checking out a revision
and how to use layering to avoid duplicating configuration information
common to your servers.

If you'd like to follow along with your laptop, I'll be around the
clubroom half an hour before the talk helping people get set up. Hope
to see you there!


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