Config Management Camp

5 - 7 February, 2018

Gent, Belgium

Event Driven Infrastructure

Mike Place

As we move firmly into the era of highly-distributed systems with very large numbers of systems to manage, new questions about how to manage the full lifecycle of an application stack healthy and performant. In order to do so, automation s ystems need to themselves adapt so that they can be reactive to changes in the system in near real-time.

In my work at SaltStack, one key response to this need is the concept of event-driven automation.

But what do we really mean when we talk about event-driven? What's an event and what do we do with them? What is the role of configuration management in an event-driven infrastructure?

In this talk, we'll discuss the origins of an event-driven infrastructure approach, from its origins in the much-maligned Enterprise Service Bus to event-driven programming paradigms that spawned it.

After describing the fundamental components of any event-driven infrastructure, we'll actually walk through a very basic proof of concept using ZeroMQ and a little bit of Python. Finally, we'll end with a brief demonstration of SaltStack's approach to event-driven automation.

About Speaker

Mike Place is the project maintainer of Salt — one of the largest, most active open-source projects in the world. He also runs the engineering team at SaltStack — the company behind Salt and maker of other fine software products for managing systems at scale. When he is not writing code, managing people or wondering how to make computers do his bidding, he enjoys trail running and skiing in the mountains behind his home in Salt Lake City, Utah.