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Architecting a Persistent and Reliable Configuration Management System

Streamlined configuration management plays a significant role in modern, complex distributed systems. Via mechanisms that promote consistency, repeatability, and transparency, configuration management systems (CMSes) address complexity and aim to increase the efficiency of administrative procedures, including deployment and failure recovery scenarios. Considering the importance of minimizing disruptions in these systems, we design an architecture that increases persistency and reliability of infrastructure management. We present our architecture in the context of hybrid, cluster-cloud environments and describe our highly available implementation that builds upon the open source CMS called Chef and infrastructure-as-a-service cloud resources from Amazon Web Services. We demonstrate how we enabled a smooth transition from the pre-existing single-server configuration to the proposed highly available management system. We summarize our experience with managing a 20-node Linux cluster using this implementation. Our analysis of utilization and cost of necessary cloud resources indicates that the designed system is a low-cost alternative to acquiring additional physical hardware for hardening cluster management. We also highlight the prototype's security and manageability features that are suitable for larger, production-ready deployments.