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What is the connection between configuration management (CM) and Linux packages? Is there a connection? Why do the Linux packages get in the way of CM all the time? Why should I care about this topic?
In the modern world everybody has some tooling for CM, be it one of chef/puppet/cfengine or something else. All CM tools basically serve the same purpose: Automate everything between a blank new machine and a running system that is ready for production. That includes installing some packages and changing configuration files.
Not really surprising, Linux packages actually serve a very similar purpose, though with a completely different objective. Packages also install other packages and also bring some configuration files.
That is the reason why we should talk about CM and packages: Two different tool sets doing the same job with different objectives. That is also the reason why CM was invented and why distro packages tend to get in the way of what you are trying to achieve with CM. Look at sysadvent.blogspot.de/2012/12/day-10-packages-doing-too-much.html for a good example of this conflict of interests.
When faced with the challenge of finding a new deployment and configuration management solution, we decided to try something different and radically new: Use Linux packages for configuration management!
In this talk I will explain the rationale behind that decision and the design choices that allowed us to do this. We believe that this is a way out of the CM-packages conflict because we actually use the same tooling for everything: OS deployment, software rollout and configuration rollout. In our world there cannot be a conflict between distro packages and configuration because we actively design our packages and configuration to work seamlessly together with the distro packages.
If the time permits I will be happy to share a live demo of how we work with configuration packages.
The result of our work is published under the GPL at yadt-project.org, our tooling to create config RPMs from configuration data snippets kept in SVN can be found in https://github.com/yadt/yadt-config-rpm-maker. Take this as an example, the important part is package-based configuration rollout. It doesn't matter how you actually create those packages, it is only important that they are dumb and contain no install-time scripts.
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