This month's NYC DevOps meetup has a special speaker: Mark Burgess, inventor of CFEngine, talking on the future of configuration management.
http://www.meetup.com/nycdevops/events/17211427/
Wednesday, May 25, 2011, 7:00 PM
Topic: Mark Burgess presents DevOps and The Future of Configuration Management
Mark Burgess is the founder, chairman, CTO and principal author of Cfengine. He is Professor of Network and System Administration at Oslo University College and has led the way in theory and practice of automation and policy based management for 20 years. In the 1990s he underlined the importance of idempotent, autonomous desired state management ("convergence") and formalised cooperative systems in the 2000s ("promise theory"). He is the author of numerous books and papers on Network and System Administration and has won several prizes for his work.
Check out his blog here: http://www.iu.hio.no/~mark/index.html
Check out Cfengine here: http://www.cfengine.org/