The Future of Open Source Configuration Management

The past 5 years has seen an increasing commercialization of the configuration space, as FOSS tools form commercial companies. The need for configuration management is great enough to support a vast number of companies today, but what is the role of Free Open Source Software amongst them? What has FOSS already contributed to the technology, and where must it go over the next decade to solve the IT industry's problems? Mark Burgess, author of Cfengine is generally credited with reinventing configuration automation in the 1990s, and continues to be a key innovator in this area. In this talk, he reviews the successes and failures of configuration technological development, and offers his unique vision of where technology needs to go to overcome the challenges of the next decade, in an increasingly complex, application-oriented, and "cloud"-oriented future.