On the difference between configuration management and provisioning.

Provisioning infrastructure with configuration management tools like Chef and Ansible can get tricky. This talk will explore how this unfolds and introduce using alternative tools like Terraform and CloudFormation for this purpose.

At many organizations I’ve worked at over the last few years, I’ve seen a common anti-pattern: configuration management (CM) tools used incorrectly as provisioning tools. This has been frustrating because using CM tools to provision infrastructure undoubtedly leads to complex code that is unmaintainable and hard to extend.

The purpose of this talk is to show how I’ve seen this unfold and how using tools such as Terraform and CloudFormation significantly reduce this complexity without compromising your reach with infrastructure as code.

I’ve seen this pattern crop up at Google, Namely (namely.com) and at a larger client engagement with ThoughtWorks. While I’ve seen Terraform and CloudFormation’s popularity increase since then, this has led me to believe that there are still teams out there that are still spending time maintaining complex Chef cookbooks or Ansible playbooks for this purpose.

This talk will serve as a light introduction to Terraform and CloudFormation for those that haven’t worked with it yet “in production”. Some knowledge of/exposure to config management tools will be required. No coding knowledge will be required.