Earlier this week, our team drove all the way to Ghent, Belgium to attend the ConfigManagementCamp 2024.
Being a free-to-attend conference right after FOSDEM, it has always been buzzing with fans of Open Source, good conversations, and electrifying ideas for new projects. As this year was no different, we wanted to share some of our impressions with you, so join us for this recap of CfgMgmtCamp 2024!
The Ol’ Reliable
As config management has always been a necessity when dealing with infrastructure and the software running on it, some tools have been around for quite some time now. I am looking at you, Puppet, Terraform, and Ansible!
It was good to see that despite their age, the respective solutions and their ecosystems continue to flourish: We could spot a few talks on event-driven Ansible and learned new ‘hacks’ when operating Puppet.
Ansible, Terraform, and the like continue being reliable tools with flourishing ecosystems.
Terraform and its fork OpenTofu, which reached GA in January, were also at the center of many talks. Forking a project like Teraform and nurturing a community all the way to its first stable release over just 5 months shows how important both, Terraform and Open Source, are to the community.
It will be interesting to see who is going to stick with Terraform and who’s set to move on to OpenTofu, as well as how the fork will diverge from Terraform.
In addition, CfgMgmtCamp 2024 was sponsored by both, Puppet Labs and Ansible, so attendees could chat with the ‘insiders’ for a bit, with many maintainers from within the community also available for discussions around their favorite config management tool.
The Shiny New Stuff
Besides reinforcing our knowledge about ‘the ol’ reliables’, we also learned about a bunch of emerging config management solutions, languages, and ideas:
Pkl is the configuration language used at Apple, which open-sourced it 3 days before CfgMgmtCamp. We were able to catch a glimpse at its core principles in the first-ever talk on Pkl.
It allows you to define configuration, which you can then export to configuration formats such as JSON or YAML. Check out the Pkl website for more information or take a look at the project’s codebase on GitHub.
Another interesting project presented at CfgMgmtCamp 2024 is winglang. It builds on the idea that a single programming language can define infrastructure and code.
It focuses on abstracting cloud concepts, making it easy to write code that leverages the cloud’s vast offerings.
We especially liked the project’s local simulator, which arranges your defined resources and functionality visually in real time.
The third project that deserves mentioning is System Initiative, a ‘collaborative power tool designed to remove the papercuts from DevOps work’.
You can think of it as DrawIO for Infrastructure, with multiplayer capabilities: It offers a GUI and several components of cloud infrastructure with which you can build your infrastructure. System Initiative will constantly validate operability and state for you while you design your infrastructure.
Our Takeaways of CfgMgmtCamp 2024
In retrospect, we take a few key points back home with us:
Everyone despises YAML, even at ‘YAMLCamp’ – projects like CUElang, Pkl, and winglang hint at that fact. If providing handrails with a type system just to generate YAML at the end of the day anyways will be enough – we’ll have to see.
Ansible, Puppet, and Terraform are here to stay – at least for the moment. We still observe innovation in the ecosystems, and the community takes matters into their own hands where necessary (Hello OpenTofu!).
Especially Ansible and Terraform were presented in many talks showcasing many scenarios, and we can vouch for those solutions from our own experiences: Those tools are great for managing cloud resources, be it for managing OpenStack with Terraform or generating dynamic inventories of your infrastructure with Ansible.
And if you don’t feel comfortable plunging into the cold waters of config management just yet, there are always our MyEngineers readily available for you.
