Config Management Camp 2024 Ghent

Overcoming technical debt in config management to move to heterogeneous architecture
2024-02-06, 17:35–18:00, D.Aud

We are increasingly seeing Arm64 instances in the cloud and on the developer workstation, and there are some benefits to integrating some Arm infrastructure for applications rather than staying x86-only in the cloud. But the actual practice of adding another architecture can lead to a lot of unwinding of invisible technical debt - platform assumptions made in shell scripts, package naming conventions in config scripts, and more. This presentation will take a real-life example, and walk through the little hiccups encoutered when moving from x86-only to x86 and Arm64 heterogeneous Kubernetes clusters, with a goal of helping others follow in these footsteps with a less steep learning curve. We will also look at how common config management tools can make the migration easier.

Dave Neary leads the Developer Relations team in Ampere Computing, helping folks understand the benefits of Ampere processors (and Arm64 in general) for cloud applications. He has been a regular at FOSDEM over the years.