#cfgmgmtcamp

1 and 2 February 2016

Gent, Belgium

Orchestration? You Don't Need Orchestration. What You Want Is Choreography

Julian Dunn - Tuesday, February 2, 11:00-11:40 - B1.017

The topic of orchestration comes up a lot when discussing configuration management. In this talk, I'd like to discuss several things:

  • How the word "orchestration" has been used to mean so many different things that it is a meaningless term now for shared understanding
  • What I think people actually mean when they say they want orchestration (ordered execution of operations across a fleet)
  • Why I think this model of thinking is wrong and incompatible with the autonomous actor model
  • How we could build systems that get us the outcomes of orchestration without needing to build it explicitly.
  • How this is particularly pertinent in an era of containerization and microservices.

    Slides and recording

    Automating AIX With Chef

    Julian Dunn - Tuesday, February 2, 14:40-15:20 - B3.019

    New deployments of IBM AIX today are rare, yet many enterprises have a significant investment in this platform. In IT, things that are working tend to not change, so we can expect these companies to run AIX for many years to come. How can we bring the benefits of modern configuration management technologies to an operating system that first appeared in 1986?

    In this talk, I'll discuss the motivations behind developing Chef Client for AIX. We'll also see how members of the AIX community have rallied around using Chef as a modern solution for managing AIX logical partitions (LPARs) and what they are doing with it.

    Slides and recording

    About Julian Dunn

    Julian is a product manager at Chef & started his career at the company in professional services. His first experience with Chef was at SecondMarket, a New-York based alternative markets startup. He has fifteen years of systems administration & software development experience at outfits large and small across such diverse sectors as advertising, broadcasting, Internet security and construction. When he's not helping customers, he enjoys good craft beer, indie music, and writing biographies about himself in the third person.