Untitled Config Game
2020-02-03, 09:40–10:30, D Aud

It’s a lovely morning in the data center and you are a horrible ~goose~ devop. What sorts of trouble can you cause? For years, configuration management has been touted as a way of guarding against the fragility that comes from having humans configure things manually, but it isn’t a complete safeguard against things going wrong. In this talk I’ll cover the evolution of configuration management strategies used by operators to increase system robustness and will share stories about the ways that even mature management practices can fail. I’ll also discuss the underlying problem from a human factors and resilience engineering perspective, ways to further increase the reliability of our tools, and how those tools may keep evolving.

Ryn Daniels is a staff infrastructure software engineer who got their start in programming with TI-80 calculators back when GeoCities was still cool. Their work has focused on infrastructure operability, sustainable on-call practices, and the design of effective and empathetic engineering cultures. They are the co-author of O’Reilly’s Effective DevOps and have spoken at numerous industry conferences on devops engineering and culture topics. Ryn lives in Berlin, Germany with a perfectly reasonable number of cats and in their spare time can often be found powerlifting, playing cello, or handcrafting knitted server koozies for the data center.