[BBLISA] June meeting (tonight/wednesday): The Tuttle system configuration tool

[John P. Rouillard]

Robert Thau from Smartleaf will present their Tuttle system
configuration tool.  It will be held this evening, Wednesday June 8,
2011 at 7PM in MIT building E-51 room 376.

   Tuttle is a tool designed to solve some configuration management
   issues we faced at Smartleaf: we have collections of machines ---
   our production cluster, and several test environments --- which
   look broadly similar, but differ in detail.

   The preceding sentence is phrased rather carefully: the
   environments are broadly similar, but differ in detail. They may,
   for instance, run the same services on different ports, send alerts
   to different email addresses, have web servers configured to
   contact different database schemata, and so forth. However, the
   machines within the environments can differ quite
   significantly. Each environment may have one or more web/compute
   servers, one or more ``batch'' servers whose configuration differs
   in small but crucial ways from the web servers, a machine that
   collects and coordinates financial datafeeds of various kinds, and
   perhaps a standby for the datafeed machine. The datafeed managers
   aren't necessarily configured much at all like the compute servers
   --- but they must know the identities of, and be able to
   communicate with them, and share relevant configuration (databases,
   port numbers, etc.) in common.

Robert Thau has done a bunch of tech-related things in his life, ranging
from a summer job in high school writing a compiler to designing the API
and writing the core code of the Apache web server 1.0. He is currently
Chief Architect at Smartleaf, which involves, among other things,
planning for management of both application code and infrastructure.


Agenda:

MIT E-51, Room 376
7:00 - Announcements & Introductions
7:25 - Door prizes (worth anywhere from $43.99 to $2.99)
7:30 - Formal presentation

I hope to see you there.

--
				-- rouilj
John Rouillard
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My employers don't acknowledge my existence much less my opinions.