PoDIM: a language for high-level configuration management

The high rate of requirement changes make system administration a complex task. This complexity is further influenced by the increasing scale, unpredictable behaviour of software and diversity in terms of hardware and software. In order to deal with this complexity, configuration management solutions have been proposed. The processes that many configuration management solutions advocate are kept close to manual system administration. This approach has failed to address the complexity of system administration in the real world. In this paper, we propose PoDIM: a high-level language for configuration management. In contrast to many existing configuration management solutions, PoDIM allows modeling of cross machine constraints. We provide an overview of the PoDIM notation, describe a case study and present a prototype. We believe that high-level languages are needed to reduce system administration complexity. PoDIM is one step in that direction.