Beyond Open Source Configuration Management: Rapidly Building Any Cloud at Scale

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.