Spine: Automating Systems Configuration and Management

Spine is Ticketmaster's in-house configuration management system, which was recently released to the community via GPL. Spine contributes significantly to our ability to manage 4,000+ globally distributed systems with a relatively small team of system administrators. This talk will focus on the tools and methods used to achieve this.

Many conventional systems provisioning tools involve the use of images and do not deal with sustained management. We, however, rely on OS-supplied provisioning tools to perform the initial bootstrap, after which Spine is deployed and used to apply system-specific configuration. We use Spine for the day-to-day management of our infrastructure, including the rollout of new applications and validating/enforcing the consistency of a given configuration across an essentially infinite number of instances.