Aslam Khan - Puppet for Human Beings (not!)
Channel: ScaleConf
Date: 20/06/2014

We can make servers look alike with Puppet, Chef, Ansible and most probably other machinery that we are going to invent. And it makes us happy, because we like conformity and consistency. Life is easier like that, we believe or hope. Yet, at ScaleConf 2013, I noticed that every company that told their story increases people proportional to increases in servers. How did that work out? Did we make all people the same - like our servers? Do we want that in the first instance? And if we don't want clones, what do we want? How do we scale a culture if value diversity? Which emerges first - consistency in values, or consistency in technology? What is the tail that is wagging a body? I will explore these and other challenges - the really tough stuff that continuous delivery pipelines don't solve. I hope you will help me answer those questions? I believe that when we understand this, we can achieve scale and balance. That's what I'm after - equilibrium at scale.

Aslam Khan is an African software developer, by birth, by choice and for life. He believes that all of software is just design and values code as an expression of design. The same goes for architecture too - it''s all design. The one thing he has learnt, though, is that design is hard, very, very hard, because achieving a harmonious balance is difficult. The same with scalability - it throws us into extreme states, way off balance. That is the challenge - finding a new equilibrium. You can read his blog at http://f3yourmind.net and follow him on twitter at https://twitter.com/aslamkhn