More and more services expose their state, internal details and metrics to be observable, and improve overall quality of service.
But what about observing the infrastructure they are deployed, configured and maintained on?
What can we learn from that, and what do we need from configuration management to get these features and metrics?
Logs from installation is a good start, but they need centralization, aggregation and especially knowledge derivation from these - but also we need to observe these features over time, to trace changes, and correlate them with monitoring.
Rudder was built around the predicate that all actions of the configuration agent need to be traced, centralized and exposed in a meaningful way - with agents ensuring the continuous configuration of systems, and this talk will show the rationale behind this predicate, how we implemented this solution, and the benefits of this approach for the modern IT world.
Nicolas is a co-founder of Rudder, he supports customers and users in the complex deployments of Rudder, both from an organizational and technical point of view. Technically, he intervenes in particular on the scalability and performance aspects of the solution, as well as on the interconnection between the policy engine and the agent.
Before founding Rudder, Nicolas explored many fields as a developer and integrator, from very low level hardware (hard disk emulation in FPGA) to neural networks.
In his spare time, Nicolas is a happy but sometimes tired father, a former Salsa dancer, and an alternative music lover.