Operating Systems are Assholes

George Miranda - Tuesday, February 7, 14:00 - 14:40 - D.AUD

A lot of the complexity we deal with in Configuration Management is the result of a long complicated legacy of how Operating Systems have evolved. Seemingly minor differences in convention have a way of creating downstream coding nightmares. Because an Operating System has so many moving parts, in Configuration Management we only focus on the bits of the system we want altered. That seemingly benign ambiguity also leads to downstream operational nightmares. Operating Systems are assholes. Why do we put up with them? This talk examines the good, the bad, and the ugly about the default assumptions we make when thinking about running production applications.

Slides are available on Speaker Deck.

About George Miranda

George Miranda is Director of Product Marketing and a Technical Evangelist with Chef Software. He's made a career working in Web Operations for over 15 years at a variety of small dotcoms and large enterprises by obsessively automating every process he can. He is recovering from production ops PTSD and still twitches when dashboards turn red. He now spends his days figuring out ways to help others avoid the same fate by confronting the challenges we all face. He enjoys his time living in the American Pacific Northwest, small batch artisanal whiskey, and writing conference biographies no one reads.