Compose :: Melbourne Speaker - Ronen Narkis

The history of live coding environments isn't new, still most of the current tools we use are static in nature and require long cycles of build/compilation/restart both in development and production, the REPL is one of the most productive environments to get instant feedback and have become the standard for contemporary functional languages.

In this talk we will go through Re-ops, a Clojure based live environment that aims to speed up remote server management, from ad hoc remote operations to metrics collection/reporting up to managing clusters of virtual machines.

Current configuration management tools (Puppet/Chef/Ansible) are custom environments running on top of Ruby/Python that don't interact (for the most part) with the hosting platform, Re-ops on the other hand is native Clojure and can use any library and language facility.

Using function composition, protocols and data structures with a dash of macros we create our own core abstractions, matching the lisp philosophy of extending the language to match our needs while keeping it simple to extend and use.

Re-ops is composed from a number of components:

• Re-core: VM management and tracking (AWS, Digital Ocean, KVM), using async job execution.
• Re-mote, remote operations on systems using SSH and ZeroMQ including data collection, aggregation, dashboarding and scheduling.
• Re-gent, remote agent that uses ZeroMQ and connects back to Re-mote, used for high throughput low latency operations (an alternative to SSH).
• Each can be used separately or combined.

In summary Re-ops offers an alternative for creating infrastructure as code, one in which we can react quickly to a fast changing environment.

Goals:

• To expose listeners to a different way of thinking with regards to operations (Devops).
• To showcase how to design a system that works well as a live environment both in Clojure (the reload workflow) and the general case.
• Explore protocols, functional composition and pipelines as a base for rapidly changing system.
• How to design the system for explorability
• Cover some interesting libraries used within Re-ops
• Compare Puppet/Chef and show how using Clojure really simplify some problems.