Development of a Configuration Management Course for Operations Students

In the recent past only a few of the "Unicorn" companies such as Facebook, Amazon, and Google were concerned about being able to deploy software into production on distributed computing architectures multiple times per day. To facilitate their ability to do this they developed a series of practices such as Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD), Test Driven Development, Agile Development and DevOps. The goal of these techniques was to be able to get the work of their thousands of developers into production as quickly, safely, reliably and consistently as possible. Most other large-scale companies have since adopted as least some of these practices and they are considered standard procedure for most large organizations.

The Operations side of deploying a modern computing application necessarily involves multiple groups working in concert to develop and test the application and the server side configuration that will support that application. This lightning talk reports on initial efforts to develop a course that encourages students to dig into issues related to configuration management, security policy development, application auditing, business control issues, and most importantly, team work. While the course is entitled "Configuration Management" it is much more about students creating a process for secure iterative application deployment that borrows extensively from the DevOps movement.