A presentation by Luke Kanies, the founder of the Puppet project, on why manageability matters during your development, and how considering it can make the difference between success and failure in the modern software world.

1. Manageability
Matters
Luke Kanies
Founder of the Puppet project
luke@reductivelabs.com
@puppetmasterd

2. Question Authority

3. Manageability

4. So you’re a software
developer

5. And you’ve written
some software

6. But no one’s using it

7. Marketing!

8. Docs!

9. Usability!

10. Docs || Usability

11. Good enough docs can
skip usability

12. Good enough usability
can skip docs

13. Two kinds of usability

14. Can I use it?

15. Can I configure it?

16. Not the same thing

17. Consumers? Sure

18. Enterprise? Not so
much

19. Configuration is meta

20. Manageability is meta-
usability

21. Or, manageability is
usability for sysadmins

22. Two audiences for
manageability

23. Humans

24. Machines

25. Gentoo is for humans

26. XML is for machines

27. You want the best of
both worlds

28. Humans configure your
software at first

29. Machines do it at scale

30. The costs of ignoring
manageability

31. “I will have to second the
recommendation for
postfix. I was an old
sendmail user and postfix
configuration is a piece of
cake by comparison.”
http://forum.slicehost.com/comments.php?DiscussionID=153

32. It’s a Darwinian world

33. Manageability is the
sysadmin selection
mechanism

34. These people are
haters

35. The users care, too

36. 2 mins to start a VM +
20 mins to configure
your software = ?

37. You slow your
customer down

38. MySQL started out in
prototypes

39. You create more
downtime

40. You piss them off

41. The benefits of
manageability

42. No cost, all gravy

43. Users use it

44. Sysadmins don’t think
about it

45. It gets plugged into
everything

46. Is your software
manageable?

47. Does it just work?

48. Are all of the inputs
machine-produceable?

49. Are all of the outputs
machine readable?

50. Yup

51. Manageability
antipatterns

52. Turing-complete
configuration languages

53. Tarball installation

54. Generating
Configurations

55. An ecosystem around
managing your software

56. Extremely profitable
professional services

57. How do you avoid
poor manageability?

58. Minimal, entirely
optional configuration

59. Convention over
configuration

60. Structured data
everywhere

61. Subystems for
everything

62. Complexity is modeled

63. Examples

64. A disclaimer

65. Software for humans

66. FreeBSD
Some package Text
management problems
cannot be automated
http://www.freebsd.org/layout/images/beastie.png

67. Where to start?
http://www.oracle.com/index.html

68. Apache
• Turing-complete configurations
• Any file can hold any content
• No conventions
http://apache.org/images/feather.gif

69. Gentoo
Every binary is unique
http://www.gentoo.org/

70. Software for computers

71. Sendmail
M4 to generate
configurations
And they’re still unusable

72. XML

73. Conclusion

74. Used more

75. Retained longer

76. Hated less

77. Questions?