AWS System Administration

Chapter 4. Configuration Management

Why Use Configuration Management?

Mike originally became enamored (obsessed might be a better word) with the idea of automatically configuring and deploying infrastructures after reading the classic “Bootstrapping an Infrastructure” paper from the LISA ’98 system administration conference.

The paper described the experiences of system administrators and architects responsible for building and maintaining large Unix environments for financial trading floors, and outlined some philosophies they adopted as a result. While somewhat dated in terms of the software used, the underlying principles are still highly relevant to managing today’s cloud infrastructures:

We recognize that there really is no “standard” way to assemble or manage large infrastructures of UNIX machines. While the components that make up a typical infrastructure are generally well-known, professional infrastructure architects tend to use those components in radically different ways to accomplish the same ends. In the process, we usually write a great deal of code to glue those components together, duplicating each others’ work in incompatible ways. Because infrastructures are usually ad hoc, setting up a new infrastructure or attempting to harness an existing unruly infrastructure can be bewildering for new sysadmins. The sequence of steps needed to develop a comprehensive infrastructure is relatively straightforward, but the discovery of that sequence can be time-consuming and fraught ...