[Config-mgmt] Naming our "field"

[Luke Kanies]

Hi all,

I just presented Puppet at OSCON, and I was only allowed to present on a 
technicality[1].  It seems that the reason the proposal wasn't initially 
"interesting" is that no one is particularly interested in operations, 
at least partially because we don't use Ruby on Rails or AJAX.

Tom Limoncelli brought this up last year during the Config-mgmt workshop 
at LISA -- we do a horrible job of describing what it is we do.  There's 
no single phrase that just works; "configuration management" is entirely 
undescriptive and it's not memorable enough that you can use it with 
people outside the specific field.

Since Tom's presentation last year, I've been trying to come up with a 
better way of talking about what we're trying to do.  So far, the best 
phrase I've come up with so far is 'programmatic administration', 
although that doesn't shorten nicely into a cool acronym or something.

Can we do some brainstorming on this?  Anyone else got any ideas?  How 
do you know when you're doing it right vs. no?  What are the ideals? 
Here are the list of words I think are related to the problem:

configuration
management
automation
system administration
sysadm
sysadmin
centralization
programmatic
networked API
abstraction
operations
datacenter

Anyone else got any other relevant words?  Can anyone take this list and 
turn it into a catchy, meaningful phrase or acronym?

1 - http://madstop.com/articles/2006/07/18/speaking-at-oscon

-- 
Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but, unlike charity, it
should end there.    --Clare Booth Luce
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Luke Kanies | http://reductivelabs.com | http://madstop.com