Summit Program

Mark Burgess is the CTO, founder, and original author of CFEngine. He was Senior Lecturer and then Professor of Network and System Administration at Oslo University College from 1994 to 2011. He was the first professor with this title. Mark obtained a PhD in Theoretical Physics in Newcastle, for which he received the Runcorn Prize. His current research interests include the behavior of computers as dynamic systems and applying ideas from physics to describe computer behavior. He led theoretical and practical contributions to the theory of automation and policy based management, including the idea of Operator Convergence and Promise Theory. He is the author of numerous books and papers on network and system administration and has won several prizes for his work.

Historically, Windows has been difficult to automate and configure. The few tools that existed were weak and serious automation required manipulating a plethora of APIs. During the past six years Microsoft has transformed the Windows platform with substantial investments in PowerShell and standards-based management. These investments have dramatically increased the ability of admins (and developers) to automate Windows tasks. With the release of Windows Server 2012, nearly every server task can be automated, locally or remotely, through PowerShell or standards-based management tools.

At the same time, modern IT businesses using agile methods with rapid release cycles found that piecemeal automation was not sufficient. This led to the rise of the DevOps movement, which emphasizes uniform automation, rapid provisioning, and repeatable high-quality IT operations. To deliver these capabilities, new desired state configuration management tools have been developed that take a more structured approach to automation. Unfortunately these tools have not had a high level of success on Windows largely due to a mismatch in management abstractions: UNIX/Linux uses a document-oriented approach whereas Windows uses an API-oriented approach.

This talk will present an overview of ongoing work in the area of Windows manageability, including a look at management abstraction mismatches how to overcome these issues; a discussion of standards-based management efforts including OMI, Microsoft's open source implementation of standards-based management; and an exploration of how we can bridge the gap to produce a world of universal automation that can (eventually) extend to all the components in the datacenter—raw hardware, storage, networking, OSes (Windows and Linux), application frameworks, applications, etc.

Bruce Payette is a Principal Developer in the Server Manageability group at Microsoft. He is a founding member of the PowerShell team, and one of the core designers of the PowerShell language. Bruce has been working on shells and management automation tools for over 20 years and is the author of the bestselling book Windows PowerShell in Action. Bruce, along with Jeffrey Snover and Jim Truher, received the 2012 LISA Outstanding Achievement Award for contributions to the system administration community.

Continuous Deployment is the natural extension of Continuous Integration: immediately deploying tested and validated code to a production environment. To achieve this goal, you'll have to use best-of-breed tools and practices. In this talk, we'll show about how to use Ansible to achieve continuous deployment of software infrastructure with zero downtime (on a multi-tier application stack), integrating with tools like Jenkins, monitoring systems, and load balancers to accomplish seamless rolling updates.

Ansible is an open source configuration management, software deployment, and IT orchestration framework. It is used to eliminate manual IT processes of all kinds. Ansible uses SSH by default to manage remote machines, requiring no agent installation, bootstrapping, or root level network daemons. Ansible uses a data driven automation language called playbooks, which are intended to be easy to audit and write for users of all technical levels.

Speaker Bio: Tim has more than 10 years of experience with infrastructure software, with a career spanning software development, architecture, and sales engineering. He's been using Linux since 1996, with his first attempt at an install crippling the family computer. Tim is Vice President of Services and Support at AnsibleWorks.

A new breed of open source software is expanding the horizons of traditional configuration management. These new tools are built for the speed and scale of any cloud and now provide remote execution, orchestration, and deployment of heterogeneous clouds and computing platforms; real-time infrastructure data; workflow automation; and efficient, fast communications in addition to configuration management. Thomas Hatch, creator of the Salt open source project, will detail the availability and usage of various open source management tools like ZeroMQ, Cobbler, Nova, Rundeck, Salt, and Jenkins, all of which were built for the requirements of cloud at scale to help automate data center management while building highly reliable compute resources. Attend this presentation to learn what the bleeding edge of open source holds for the future of configuration management.

Tom is the creator of the Salt open source software project. After spending years building and managing data centers, Tom recognized a significant need for software purpose-built to handle the speed and scale of modern cloud infrastructures. His experience as principle cloud architect for Beyond Oblivion, software engineer for Applied Signal Technology, and systems administrator for Backcountry.com provided exposure to dozens of new and old infrastructure management technologies and helped establish the vision for Salt. Today Tom is one of the most active contributors in the open-source community, and is widely regarded as rising star. For his work on Salt, in 2012 Tom received the Black Duck “Rookie of the Year” award and was named to the GitHub Octoverse Top 10 list for the project with the highest number of unique contributors, rubbing shoulders with projects like Ruby on Rails and OpenStack.

Continuous integration, or CI, has been widely embraced by developers, but configuration management can find a lot of power in testing configuration management code as it's developed. Simple static analysis is a good first step, but more advanced analysis is required to ensure maximum uptime. Traditional testing tools like rspec-puppet often have limitations that make them less useful for very complex modules. 

In this talk, we will examine approaches to improving confidence in configuration through various approaches, including catalog compilation with predetermined facts, test deployments, virtual copies of production systems, and canary server builds. We'll also show typical failures that make it past each stage of testing, and why each new aspect of testing can improve uptime and reduce errors. We will also explore how sound CI testing can help ease rapid systems and configuration management growth.

Matthew Barr is a technical architect and ops team lead for Snap Interactive, makers of the social dating app AYI, with 68 million installed users and code going live approximately 20 times a day. He has over 15 years of experience as a Linux/UNIX systems administrator.

Making changes to systems in a highly-distributed, massively parallel environment can result in system inconsistencies. Change requests can time out or result in error. It can also take hours for updates to get scheduled or complete.

This talk describes how Google is using its proprietary package manager to maintain consistency across its server farm. We describe some of the design decisions and features that allow us to do things traditional package managers cannot in order to ensure consistency. We also discuss creative ways projects are leveraging the architecture and our infrastructure to distribute changes reliably and consistently.

Dinah McNutt is a Release Engineer at Google, Inc. A graduate of MIT, she has been involved with systems administration since the mid-1980’s. Some of her accomplishments include writing the Daemons & Dragons column for UNIX Review</i> magazine and serving on the USENIX LISA program committee several times (including once as chair).

She has 20 years of commercial release engineering experience and has released all types of UNIX-based software from shrink-wrapped through Web-based services to appliances.