Getting Configuration Management in place is a big step in the direction of infrastructure automation. Chef, Puppet and Co. replace error-prone manual changes with periodic system convergence runs controlled by a central database. Even with Puppet’s exported resources and Chef’s search capabilities, the weakness of this approach is that it is rather static. In situations where we need to propagate information quickly, handle failure detection, or tolerate network partitions, other tools might offer better solutions.
In this talk, I’m going to present some of these alternatives (e.g. serf, etcd) and how they can be used to allow for more dynamic configuration changes.