Configuration Management: Stability in Your Pipeline by Sascha Bates
Channel: Flowcon
Date: 2013-11-21

Presented at FlowCon San Francisco 2013 http://flowcon.org/flowcon-sanfran-2013/schedule/index.jsp

Provisioning and deploying a production-worthy application has never been simple. With the increase in scale and complexity of applications, it's no longer enough to scramble up code with Ant, season it with shell scripts, drop it into Dev and call it a day; especially when Dev bears no resemblence to Production.  Confidence in your release quality starts in dev. Engendering that confidence means environment configurations and deployment scripts closely aligned with Production.  Regardless of whether you deploy Java, Ruby or .Net apps, configuration management is the foundation that will help you find that homogeneity from workstation to production servers.

In this talk we'll discuss why consistency matters and how to use configuration management in both existing and new projects to find confidence, stability and consistency in your pipeline.

 Before she became an automation junkie, Sascha built plenty of systems by hand. She learned exactly how well the claim, "We're only building it once," holds up. (Hint: you will always need more environments!) Now she is Automator of All Things. She is a DevOps enthusiast who helps developers make beautiful things.

Sascha has brought her blend of scripting and sanity to companies for more than ten years, across all levels of abstraction: bare metal, virtual machines, clusters, deployment pipelines, and performance optimization.