Languages of Infra: Beyond YAML

This track explores the landscape of languages, techniques, tools, and burgeoning ecosystems dealing with the scale of problems we’ve reached today in modern infrastructure.

Modern infrastructure and operations extend beyond the setup and provisioning of machines, data centers, and cloud.  It now includes delivery pipelines, processes, security operations, configuration, policy, compliance management, data management, and more. Correctly automating modern systems has become frustratingly complex and failures have substantial negative consequences. Static text-based data serialization like YAML is falling short of expressivity, and is seldom sufficient. To manage this growing complexity, the declarative approach to configuration has become more and more popular, led by the infrastructure-as-code (IaC) paradigm.

Audience members will learn

  • various approaches to Infrastructure as Code from a wide range of industry experts.

  • historical and contextual explanations of the problem space of IaC.

  • IaC solutions, alongside constraints and tradeoffs.

  • deeper understanding of modern system cross-cutting problems and solutions.


From this track

Session Modern Infrastructure

Taming Configuration Complexity Made Fun with CUE

Monday Oct 24 / 10:35AM PDT

Configuration has become the number one complexity problem to solve in infrastructure and beyond. Configuration is in more places than people imagine. Every part of your tech stack—databases, apps, schemas, services, workflows, policy, models, networking—must be configured.

Speaker image - Marcel van Lohuizen
Marcel van Lohuizen

Creator of CUE

Session

Unconference: Language of Infrastructure

Monday Oct 24 / 11:50AM PDT

What is an unconference? At QCon SF, we’ll have unconferences in most of our tracks.

Speaker image - Shane Hastie
Shane Hastie

Global Delivery Lead for SoftEd and Lead Editor for Culture & Methods at InfoQ.com

Session Modern Infrastructure

Programming Your Policies

Monday Oct 24 / 01:40PM PDT

Software is eating the world, and this talk is about how it is coming to eat the world of policy. I will talk about why this is happening, what the business drivers are, and how it affects developers and compliance and security departments, and the cultural and communication changes there.

Speaker image - Justin Cormack
Justin Cormack

CTO @Docker

Session Modern Infrastructure

Sprinkling eBPF Onto Your Observability

Monday Oct 24 / 02:55PM PDT

When talking about Observability in 2022 there is no way around eBPF. However, eBPF is often seen as magic dust that can be sprinkled into infrastructure and magically do anything, when the reality is much more complicated.

Speaker image - Frederic Branczyk
Frederic Branczyk

CEO & Founder @PolarSignalsIO, previously Senior Principal Engineer @Redhat

Session Modern Infrastructure

Infrastructure as Code: Past, Present, Future

Monday Oct 24 / 04:10PM PDT

Infrastructure as code enables us to automate and manage all sorts of infrastructure, from on-premises virtual machines to cloud resources, and everything in between.

Speaker image - Joe Duffy
Joe Duffy

Founder and CEO @PulumiCorp

Session

Panel: Languages of Infrastructure

Monday Oct 24 / 05:25PM PDT

Join us for a moderated panel from our speakers about the future of languages of Infrastructure, YAML, Infrastructure as Code, and more. We will have an online form for you to fill out questions in advance as you hear the talks throughout the day. 

Speaker image - Frederic Branczyk
Frederic Branczyk

CEO & Founder @PolarSignalsIO, previously Senior Principal Engineer @Redhat

Speaker image - Marcel van Lohuizen
Marcel van Lohuizen

Creator of CUE

Speaker image - Justin Cormack
Justin Cormack

CTO @Docker

Speaker image - Joe Duffy
Joe Duffy

Founder and CEO @PulumiCorp

Speaker image - Adam Jacob
Adam Jacob

CEO @System Initiative, CTO @Chef; Systems Administrator who loves building products

Track Host

Carmen Andoh

Hacker at @cue_lang, previously @google @golang @travisci

Hacker & SocioTechnical Systems Debugger at @cue_lang, previously of Google and Travis CI. At the intersection of programming languages, infrastructure, developer experience, tooling, and Configuration (big C) for systems large and small. Helping Platform Engineers/DevOps/SRE/{insert newest $FOO here} wade through the complexity.

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