PuppetConf 2015

Many of the greatest achievements in the history of computers are based on lies, or rather, the strategic sets of lies we call "abstraction." Operating systems lie to programs about hardware, multitasking systems lie to users about parallelism, the list goes on and on. One of the primary "strategic lies" of the internet is the that each site is a discrete, cohesive entity. It is within this abstraction that we are able to build highly available applications - systems designed to _never go down_. Let's take a tour through the amazing stack of tools that helps us construct fault tolerant systems. We'll review some of the core technology underlying the internet, then we'll talk about some basic primitives and how they combine into useful patterns.