David Yates is researching how to improve the connection between business and IT services. He is using tools like Puppet for configuration management to help make IT services more autonomic and available on demand. His goal is to develop techniques to measure how IT resources are being used and the business value they provide. He wants to increase transparency between IT operations and the business users through extensions to tools like Puppet.

2. Tricks, Discipline & Mastery
 In Football, you are only as good as
your arsenal of moves (tricks).
 Which is a similar approach to the Sys
Admin “Laziness as a Virtue” concept.
 Mastery of either requires discipline in
 Training
 Study
 Practice

3. People, Process, and
Automation
 Systems need to know when they’re
healthy, when to call out for help, and
know when they’re sick.
 Operations doesn’t scale unless human
intervention is minimized.
 You have to demonstrate efficiency and
effectiveness to your organization, do
this be demonstrating the business
value you are adding day to day.

4. Boxo Data
 David Yates, PHd
Assistant Professor, CIS
Department Head MSIT
dyates@bentley.edu
(o) 781.891.2735
 Thomas A. McGonagle, MSIT
mcgonagle@gmail.com
(gv) 617.394.8660

5. Boxo Data
 Boxo Data
“Box of Datacenter”
“Datacenter in a Box”
 Puppet On Tracks
https://github.com/mcgonagletom/PuppetOnTracks
 Puppet Jujutsu
“Puppet the Gentle Way”
 Puppet Origami
“Bending the Puppet Models”

6. Everett Crimson Tide
Everett High Football Team
Omar Xavier Easy
Born October 29, 1977

7. Everett 1996 Season
Greater Boston Champions
Everett 29 Durfee 0
Everett 13 Winchester 12
Everett 32 Revere 0
Everett 32 Arlington 6
Everett 41 Somerville 7
Everett 35 Medford 15
Everett 38 Peabody 26
Everett 36 Peabody 26
Everett 37 Malden 26
Everett 40 Cambridge R&L 6

8. Greatest Football Story Ever
 Amazing Everett Football Story
https://github.com/mcgonagletom/PuppetO
nTracks/raw/master/SCRIM/Sons%20ca
rry%20dad's%20spirit%20-
%20Archives_%20Boston%20Herald.pd
f

9. Everett 1996 Season
Greater Boston Champions
Everett 29 Durfee 0
Everett 13 Winchester 12
Everett 32 Revere 0
Everett 32 Arlington 6
Everett 41 Somerville 7
Everett 35 Medford 15
Everett 38 Peabody 26
Everett 36 Peabody 26
Everett 37 Malden 26
Everett 40 Cambridge R&L 6

10. What do you do when you are
hopelessly outmatched?

11. You Change the Game
 You go fully tactical and you weaponize

12. Winchester Wrestling
 World Class Wrestling

13. Forget Tools, We need
Weapons
 Franklin – “man is a tool making animal”
 Thoreau – “men have become the tools
of their tools”
 Emerson – “All the tools and engines on
Earth are only extensions of man’s limbs
and senses.

14. Jujutsu – The Gentle Art
 Old Style Jujutsu Developed (1333-
1573)
 The systems practiced were not
systems of unarmed combat, but rather
means for an unarmed or lightly armed
warrior to fight a heavily armed and
armored enemy on the battlefield.

15. Jujutsu’s Five Arts
 The Art of Blocking
 The Art of the Fulcrum Throw
 The Art of the Non-Fulcrum Throw
 The Art of Escaping
 The Art of Stricking

16. SERE
 Survival
 Evasion
 Resistance
 Escape

17. Jujutsu Combat
 Methods of combat include striking
(kicking and punching), throwing (body
throws, joint-lock throws, unbalance
throws), restraining (pinning, strangling,
grappling, wrestling) and weaponry.
Defensive tactics include blocking,
evading, off-balancing, blending and
escaping.

18. How can you weaponize
yourself?

19. Weaponizing Puppet
 Autonomitize your infrastructure to make
it fully automated
 http://www.research.ibm.com/autonomic/
 http://dev2ops.org/toolchain/

20. Polymorphism &
Isomorphism
 Make your Puppet models as
polymorphic as you can
 Use inheritance correctly
 Approach your infrastructure’s hostname
and ip address as the main data input
into your build/provisioning system

21. Hostname Isomorphism
 wwwplqa01.cam.example.net
 www => role
○ pl => product
 qa => zone
 01 => hostid
 wwwplqa01 => hostname
 cam => datacenter
 example.net => domain
 wwwplqa01.cam.example.net => fqdn

22. IP Isomorphism
 10.1.1.1
 10.1 => datacenter
 10.1.1 => zone/product
 10.1.1.1 => possible role

23. People, Process, and
Automation
 Systems need to know when they’re
healthy, when to call out for help, and
know when they’re sick.
 Operations doesn’t scale unless human
intervention is minimized.
 You have to demonstrate efficiency and
effectiveness to your organization, do
this be demonstrating the business
value you are adding day to day.

24. David Yates
 David Yates is an Associate Professor of Computer
Information Systems at Bentley University. His
research areas include computer networking, data
communications, sensor networks, embedded
systems, operating systems and architecture. Before
joining Bentley, he was vice president of software
development at InfoLibria – a start-up that grew to
become a leading provider of network equipment for
building content distribution and delivery networks
before it was acquired. He holds several US patents
for processes and systems related to computer
networking, content management and mobile
computing. He holds a PhD and MSc from the
University of Massachusetts and a BSc from Tufts
University.

25. What is David Working On?
 “As cloud computing matures, it will
undoubtedly transform the information
technology (IT) industry, and will also
profoundly change the way people work
and companies operate. For this
promise to be fulfilled web services,
mobile apps, and system management
will need to evolve towards autonomic IT
services that are available to users
when and where they need them.

26. David’s Work cont.
 The focus of our research is to connect the success
of business and IT services so that people working in
each domain can better understand and collaborate
with each other. To perform this research, we
integrate open source tools and develop additional
infrastructure to monitor and manage the
performance of IT services. The central tool in this
work is Puppet, which is designed to do configuration
management. Thus, one focus of our research is to
explore how to extend configuration management
system to directly indirectly measure the business
value of IT services.

27. David’s Work cont.
 Puppet enables an IT service provider to
manage resources such as networks, web
servers, app servers, databases, and so on, in
a flexible manner. To explore potential
research questions, we are developing
techniques to highlight how hardware and
software components are being used and to
what extent they are creating value for the
business. Thus, we are using Puppet and
other tools to create the necessary
transparency to see the activities of the IT
function in action and how these activities
connect with the business to create value.”

28. Puppet, ITIL, and Compliance

29. Puppet and The Private Cloud