Ben Ford
Ben is a software engineer and community leader with extensive knowledge and expertise in the Puppet ecosystem. He's honored to call many of you friend and learn from you every day. He's been organizing Linux Users Groups, run clubs, and roller derby teams for most of his adult life and even a bit before that. Before coming to Puppet, he taught Anthropology grad students how to code in Java and then used that experience to introduce Puppet to many of you.
Ben has been obsessed with collective benefit for decades and is motivated by enabling the success of others. He's been dreaming of a world in which his skills don't just feed the capitalist maw. He is a long-distance runner but isn't interested in boasting about race times; he'd rather hear how your race went for
Session
OpenVox is the modern open source implementation of the world's most capable configuration management platform -- trusted by everyone from the smallest hobbyist to operators of some of the largest commercial infrastructures in the business. With OpenVox as the engine powering infrastructure deployment and configuration, it's easy to see why the community maintained OSS fork of Puppet is becoming the industry standard in resource abstraction and drift remediation.
This workshop will introduce you to the concepts of declarative and idempotent programming as well as the tried-and-true patterns developed by the community over the last two decades. Start off with the roles and profiles method to learn how composable your infrastructure can be, and get into the weeds with your own component modules for when you have to go beyond the basics.
Come get your hands dirty and learn the foundations of configuration management.