Meta

The Challenge

For many years, Facebook managed its systems with cfengine2. With many individual clusters over 10k nodes in size, a slew of different constantly-changing system configurations, and small teams, this system was showing its age and the complexity was steadily increasing, limiting its effectiveness and usability. It was difficult to integrate with internal systems, testing was often impractical, and it provided no isolation of configurations, among many other problems.

“When your environment is big, doing things one-off doesn’t scale,” said Phil Dibowitz, Production Engineer, Facebook. “At some point you have to deal with reality. You can postpone automation for a long time and make your life really, really difficult. But at some point your life goes from difficult to impossible.”

See Phil’s ChefTalk about the need for automation