2026-02-03, 09:30–10:20, D.Aud
Configuration management has long struggled to reconcile the stability of static definitions with the agility of dynamic environments. This traditional separation has led to fragmented tools, complex workflows, and costly outages.
Challenging the common view of configuration as a purely static entity, we will demonstrate how to seamlessly integrate static schemas and versioned configurations with the demands of dynamic components, such as policy enforcement, monitoring, and ephemeral configuration using CUE's logic-based approach to configuration. We show by means of real-life examples that this approach goes beyond mere templating, enabling the slicing and dicing of configuration from different sources and formats to enable cross-cutting functionality that adapts to evolving conditions.
Marcel van Lohuizen is the CEO and co-founder of CUE Labs. CUE is the result of Marcel's 20 years of experience in configuration management at Google and before. At Google Marcel was, among other things, a member of the founding Borg team (the inspiration for Kubernetes) and a long-time member of the Go team. As part of the Borg project, Marcel created the core tooling as well as the Borg Configuration Language (BCL) which later was generalized to GCL.