In Search of Certainty

Foreword

Over the years I’ve noticed that many people working on performance, capacity planning, and configuration of large scale systems think differently, and are particularly effective because they have a background in physics. Personally I have a degree in Applied Physics and enjoy the way Mark introduces scientific concepts, and applies them to computer systems, in this book. Unlike many books in the general area of systems administration, which are tied to specific tools or platforms, and which date over time, the fundamental scientific concepts described here aren’t going to change. As time passes, more people are finding the path that leads in search of certainty to the ideas around promise theory, and—over time—I believe this book will be seen as an important landmark in the development of our craft.

Mark is both a practitioner and an academic, and he has brought rigor, clarity and a deep understanding of the physics of complex systems to the world of systems administration. Where the state of the art used to be “type in the commands in the installation manual or run book by hand”, he built CFEngine to repeatably automate configuration steps, and inspired several generations of tools that create infrastructure with code. Moving on from “hack it until it appears to work and don’t touch it until it breaks again”, he implemented the idea that a large collection of systems should actively maintain a desired configuration. Now, with this updated second edition of In Search of ...