Jay Goldberg
Jay Goldberg is a Unix greybeard since 1989. He used to develop the Unix operating system, then started down the system management path at Unix System Labs. He has been doing configuration management in some form since 1995. He has built and managed infrastructure at a number of investment banks and is currently working to keep Linux easy to manage at scale at Two Sigma, a New York financial services firm. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter.
Sessions
This talk recounts the journey of developing a Linux platform to require very little in the way of configuration management, and how to virtually eliminate the need to modify code to change configuration. From configuration via scripts and evolving through a couple of configuration management products, we have used the idea of matching actions to timescales to transform how we do configuration management. We now do very little of it, and we have dramatically reduced its complexity.
Data-driven configuration management is a design pattern that can reduce complexity, improve outcomes, and empower engineers to make configuration changes without having to modify code. The new classfiltercsv function in CFEngine 3.14 makes it straightforward to implement a data-driven approach, allowing for:
- Using configuration rather than code to do configuration management
- Deploying simpler code that is easier to use and maintain
- Focusing on higher-order issues
While this talk demonstrates how to use CFEngine's classfiltercsv function to produce these results, the discussion of the approach to data-driven configuration may be of interest to anyone in the configuration management community.