Last Sunday, part of our team drove all the way to Ghent in Belgium to take part in ConfigManagementCamp 2024.
This is a free conference, held directly after FOSDEM, which attracts a large audience of open source fans, good conversations and new ideas year after year. This year was no different, so in this article we want to look back at CfgMgmtCamp 2024.
The old reliable ones
Config management as a task area has long been a necessity in the day-to-day operation of IT infrastructure and software. So it is only natural that there are now a number of established, “old” solutions, e.g. Puppet, Terraform or Ansible.
It was great to see that the projects and their respective ecosystems are still full of life: Whether event-driven Ansible or new ‘hacks’ in dealing with Puppet, there were definitely still new things to learn!
Terraform and its brand-new fork OpenTofu, which celebrated its first stable release in January, were also the subject of several talks.
The fact that OpenTofu was able to go from fork to stable release within five months shows just how important the project is to the community.
It will be exciting to see how the two projects continue to develop (apart).
It is also worth mentioning that both Puppet Labs and Ansible were sponsors at CfgMgmtCamp 2024, so that you could exchange ideas with maintainers and the community directly ‘at the source’.
New year, new tools
Of course, we weren’t just there to deepen our knowledge of existing tools, we also wanted to learn about new ones!
There were several options for this:
Pkl is a configuration language that is used internally at Apple. Apple decided to open source it 3 days before the CfgMgmtCamp. We were able to get a first impression at the world’s first talk on Pkl:
The configuration language allows you to create typed and consistently validated configurations, which can then be exported in formats such as YAML or JSON. More details can be found on the project website or in the project’s GitHub repository
Another interesting project that was presented at CfgMgmtCamp 2024 is winglang. The underlying idea of having a programming language for infrastructure and code was very well received.
Winglang focuses on the abstraction of the various building blocks “in the cloud” to facilitate the definition of workloads and infrastructure.
We particularly liked the local simulator, which reflects the defined resources and the behavior of the workloads in real time.
The third innovation we want to mention is System Initiative, a ‘collaborative power tool designed to remove the papercuts from DevOps work’. You can think of it like DrawIO for Infrastructure, with multiplayer support: it’s a GUI with a variety of cloud components that you can use to build your infrastructure in the clouds.
System Initiative constantly checks the correctness and status of your project in the background against the cloud you trust.
Our findings from CfgMgmtCamp 2024
Looking back, we were able to take two fundamental insights with us to Nuremberg:
Nobody likes YAML, even in the ‘YAMLCamp’ – approaches like CUElang, Pkl and winglang more than obviously point to this.
Whether languages with stricter rules regarding correctness are the right way to generate YAML in the end remains to be seen.
Ansible, Puppet and Terraform are still relevant. Once again this year, we were able to observe innovations, further developments and lively discussions about the tools and their respective ecosystems. In addition, the open source community impressively demonstrated last year that it can also take matters into its own hands if necessary (hello, OpenTofu!).
Some of the talks about Terraform and Ansible were particularly interesting for us, as we also use them in conjunction with OpenStack: Be it in the interaction of OpenStack with Terraform or the creation of dynamic inventories of our infrastructure in the cloud for Ansible.
And if you don’t feel ready to jump straight into the deep end of config management, our MyEngineers® are ready to help you at any time.
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