Formed in 2009, the Archive Team (not to be confused with the archive.org Archive-It Team) is a rogue archivist collective dedicated to saving copies of rapidly dying or deleted websites for the sake of history and digital heritage. The group is 100% composed of volunteers and interested parties, and has expanded into a large amount of related projects for saving online and digital history.
DevOpsQA NJ just held our September Meetup on Configuration Management with David Bowser and Jeremiah Sullivan from Puppet Labs and Michael Pereira from Syncsort as speakers. The venue was provided by ROKITT at a state-of-the-art office space with breathtaking views of NYC.
Mi
chael gave a great introduction to Environment Automation by giving a live demo of BCMT – Bash Configuration Management Tool – which he developed to demonstrate 2 critical concepts – Idempotence and Convergence. Idempotence means that multiple applications of the same action do not have side effect on the system state while convergence means to bring system state in line with a defined polic
y. Changes are made on the system only if they need to be made which is one of the key behind the configuration management tools. My favorite was the definition for Configuration Management provided by Michael – “Whatever you need to run your application” – short, simple, straight to the point.
Next, David and Jeremiah gave a rundown of 2015 State of DevOps Report and a history of Puppet Labs. Jeremiah covered the Open Source Puppet followed by a live demo of Puppet Ent
erprise. Puppet Enterprise offers everything available in Open Source edition, plus support, training and a web based GUI. Puppet allows to automate provisioning for physical machines, as well as VMs, Docker containers, and AWS instances. One of the reasons Puppet is so powerful is due to the variety of the existing modules that are available from Puppet community.
At the end we had a great Q&A session ranging from Jenkins integration, automated validation of the modules, extending of the modules and future of Chocolatey. 
