Sponsored by the National Science Foundation

Configuration Management For Experimenters

Sarah Edwards, GPO

Max Ott, NICTA

Sponsored by the National Science Foundation 2

What do experimenters need?

• Ensure experiment is in a known configuration• Easily repeat existing experiment setups (for

multiple runs, changing parameters, etc)

Reproduce configuration across space and time• Easy to build many nodes that look the same • Useful for scaling up the size of topologies (space)• Useful for rebuilding a topology repeatedly (time)

Sponsored by the National Science Foundation 3

Some Definitions

Configuration Management

Ensure a computer system is in a specified state

Software Deployment

Install software onto a system

Push vs Pull

Server pushes onto the resource

Resource pulls configuration onto itself

Agent

Client software

Sponsored by the National Science Foundation 4

CM Systems are Idempotent

CM systems are usually idempotent• Repeated runs generates the same

state• Contrast to a shell script which

encodes how to transition between two known states

The state is usually easy to describe.• iperf should be (or not be) installed• File foo.html should exist (or not)

Describing all possible transitions from every possible previous state is hard.• If iperf is not already installed, then

install it, else do nothingKnownState A

KnownState B

Shell scriptA -> B

UnknownState A

KnownState B

? CM

CM

Idempotent

Idempotent

Sponsored by the National Science Foundation 5

Agenda

• Puppet - Stéphane Blais, GPO• Ansible - Tim Upthegrove, GPO• Chef - Max Ott, NICTA• Salt - Nick Bastin, Barnstormer Softworks• Fabric - Nick Bastin, U of Houston

Sponsored by the National Science Foundation 6

<Other talks happen here>

Sponsored by the National Science Foundation 7

Compare/Contrast

Puppet Ansible Chef Salt Fabric

Push/Pull Pull Push Push ORPull

Push, pull and peer-to-peer

Push

Agent/Agentless

Agent None Agent Agent None

Authentication/Authorization

Certificates SSH SSH PKI SSH

Languages ~ruby YAML Jinga2Python

ruby PythonYAML

Python

Sponsored by the National Science Foundation 8

Related Hands-On Tutorials

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GEE includes Ansible

Hands-OnChef + Ansible