Hélène (coordinator of the project) has given the 18th of June a keynote at DisCoTec 2025

Slide are available here!

Title

Challenges in Infrastructure-as-Code: efficiency, decentralization, and formalization

Asbtract

In this talk I will try to draw your attention to infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tools and languages. These languages enable managing distributed infrastructures and applications through code, thus achieving interesting properties such as versionability, testability, and sharability. Their use is particularly crucial for automatically and correctly managing resources in the Cloud, especially for large-scale infrastructures (fog or edge computing). Infrastructure-as-Code languages include aspects of programming languages, life-cycle coordination, dynamic reconfiguration and autonomic computing. I am going to focus in particular on three scientific challenges in IaC: efficiency, decentralization and formalization.

This talk will be punctuated by my own contributions to dynamic reconfiguration: a full study to leverage programmable life-cycles of software entities and their automatic coordination during reconfigurations. This programmability offers more opportunities for parallelism and concurrency. As a consequence, programmable life-cycles significantly reduce the execution time of reconfigurations. However, as more complexity is introduced, it becomes harder to guarantee other positive properties offered by the literature: safety, declarativity, and decentralization.

I will open this talk on the problem of resilience and robustness of infrastructure and associated potential new challenges in IaC.