Manageability Matters
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Transcript of Manageability Matters
Question Authority
Manageability
So you’re a software developer
And you’ve written some software
But no one’s using it
Marketing!
Docs!
Usability!
Docs || Usability
Good enough docs can skip usability
Good enough usability can skip docs
Two kinds of usability
Can I use it?
Can I configure it?
Not the same thing
Consumers? Sure
Enterprise? Not so much
Configuration is meta
Manageability is meta-usability
Or, manageability is usability for sysadmins
Two audiences for manageability
Humans
Machines
Gentoo is for humans
XML is for machines
You want the best of both worlds
Humans configure your software at first
Machines do it at scale
The costs of ignoring manageability
“I will have to second the recommendation for postfix. I was an old
sendmail user and postfix configuration is a piece of
cake by comparison.”
http://forum.slicehost.com/comments.php?DiscussionID=153
It’s a Darwinian world
Manageability is the sysadmin selection
mechanism
These people are haters
The users care, too
2 mins to start a VM + 20 mins to configure
your software = ?
You slow your customer down
MySQL started out in prototypes
You create more downtime
You piss them off
The benefits of manageability
No cost, all gravy
Users use it
Sysadmins don’t think about it
It gets plugged into everything
Is your software manageable?
Does it just work?
Are all of the inputs machine-produceable?
Are all of the outputs machine readable?
Yup
Manageability antipatterns
Turing-complete configuration languages
Tarball installation
Generating Configurations
An ecosystem around managing your software
Extremely profitable professional services
How do you avoid poor manageability?
Minimal, entirely optional configuration
Convention over configuration
Structured data everywhere
Subystems for everything
Complexity is modeled
Examples
A disclaimer
Software for humans
FreeBSDSome package
management problems cannot be automated
Text
http://www.freebsd.org/layout/images/beastie.png
Where to start?
http://www.oracle.com/index.html
Apache
• Turing-complete configurations
• Any file can hold any content
• No conventions
http://apache.org/images/feather.gif
Gentoo
Every binary is unique
http://www.gentoo.org/
Software for computers
SendmailM4 to generate configurations
And they’re still unusable
XML
Conclusion
Used more
Retained longer
Hated less
Questions?