Speaker
Narayan Desai
(ANL)
Description
In modern environments, system administrators must increasingly work with complex and critical systems. Robust configuration management techniques and the improved understanding of configuration that it entails both dramatically improve the productivity of system administrators and robustness of systems. We begin this talk with a configuration management primer. We also provide an architectural overview of Bcfg2, an open-source configuration management tool developed at ANL. Bcfg2 provides a number of unique features enabling groups to bring complexity under control, retain institutional knowledge, and efficiently scale manpower to large numbers of managed systems and configuration diversity.
This talk provides a detailed description of the capabilities of Bcfg2, the manner in which groups worldwide have deployed it, and their deployment results. It also provides advice for groups seeking to improve their configuration management processes.
Primary author
Narayan Desai
(ANL)