Integrated Configuration Management at Gridka

At KIT we operate more than 800 hosts to run the Large Scale Data Facility (LSDF) and the WLCG Tier1 center GridKa. Thereby, our Config Management efforts aim for a reliable, consistent and reproducible host deployment which allows for unattended mass deployment of stateless machines like the GridKa Compute Farm. In addition, our approach supports efficient patch management to tackle security challenges and rapid recovery of the entire infrastructure after a cyber attack. Further, we relieve our system administrators from low level tasks and enable them to focus on conceptual work and user support. This leads to highly specialized staff that focuses on dedicated services instead of entire hosts.

In our presentation we will talk about the architecture of our Configuration Management System and the technologies we use. This includes puppet, hiera, foreman, gitlab and various interfaces to external services like DNS or Certificate Authorities.