SPLASH 2021
Sun 17 - Fri 22 October 2021 Chicago, Illinois, United States

CONFLANG is a workshop on the design, the theory, the practice and the future evolution of configuration languages.

Build systems, package managers, operating systems, cloud infrastructures, and web services are examples of modern complex software systems that require an extensive and non-trivial configuration in order to make them adapted to each different use-case. To manage the growing complexity that is then offloaded to configurations, the declarative approach has become more and more popular, illustrated for example by the infrastructure-as-code paradigm. This leads configuration to play an important role in critical aspects of software engineering, including security, availability, and maintainability.

However, static text-based configuration alone is falling short of expressivity, and is seldom sufficient. Data cannot be transformed, combined nor shared, resulting at best in boilerplate and duplication of information, or at worst, in data being invalid or inconsistent. Data validation isn’t supported either, and must be handed over to yet another tool down the configuration pipeline, if ever done. Correctly configuring a modern system is hard and failures may have substantial negative consequences.

These are the reasons why we witness the birth of a new generation of languages specialized in generating, validating or enriching static configurations. Some of these languages take a holistic point of a view and provide programmable configurations. Others prefer to specialize in one aspect of configuration, such as validation. These languages lie in a singular domain of the design space, with specific constraints, trade-offs and goals. Thus, because configuration languages operate under very different design constraints than traditional programming languages, because of their practical importance in software engineering and deployment, and because of exciting new developments, we think configuration languages are a worthy area of research.

CONFLANG aims to gather this emerging community in order to engage in fruitful interactions, to share ideas, results, opinions, and experiences on languages for configuration. Correct configuration is an actual industrial problem, and would greatly benefit from existing and ongoing academic research. Dually, this is a space with new challenges to overcome and new directions to explore, which is a great opportunity to confront new ideas with large-scale production systems.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Infrastructure and configuration code maintenance and evolution
  • Specification learning and mining for configurations
  • Infrastructure and Configuration testing and verification
  • Infrastructure as Code and configuration repair
  • New languages for configuration
  • The application of language security and type theory to program configuration
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09:00 - 10:20
LanguagesCONFLANG at Zurich E
Chair(s): Nicolas Jeannerod Tweag I/O, Mark Santolucito Barnard College, Columbia University, USA
09:00
5m
Talk
A Language for Configuring Security Policies
CONFLANG
Gilad Bracha NOT_PROVIDED
Media Attached
09:05
5m
Talk
Provenance of Configuration Programming Language muPuppet
CONFLANG
Weili Fu University of Freiburg, Germany, Paul Anderson University of Edinburgh, James Cheney University of Edinburgh; Alan Turing Institute
Media Attached
09:10
5m
Talk
The Pitfalls of Ansible’s Variable and Template Expression Semantics
CONFLANG
Ruben Opdebeeck Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Coen De Roover Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Media Attached
09:15
5m
Talk
Typing in Nickel and elsewhere
CONFLANG
Media Attached
09:20
60m
Live Q&A
Languages: Q&A and discussion
CONFLANG

10:50 - 12:10
Configuration managementCONFLANG at Zurich E
Chair(s): Jürgen Cito TU Wien and Facebook, Marcel van Lohuizen CUE
10:50
5m
Talk
Analyzing Infrastructure as Code to Prevent Intra-update Sniping Vulnerabilities
CONFLANG
Julien Lepiller Yale University
Media Attached
10:55
5m
Talk
Continuous Configuration Testing
CONFLANG
Tianyin Xu University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Media Attached
11:00
5m
Talk
Intra-update Sniping Vulnerabilities in Smart Contracts
CONFLANG
Mark Santolucito Barnard College, Columbia University, USA, Shmuel Berman Columbia University, Brennen Yu Columbia University, USA, Stella Lessler
Media Attached
11:05
5m
Talk
Local Expectation Testing for Terraform
CONFLANG
11:10
5m
Talk
Scuemata: A Framework for Evolvable, Composable Data Schema
CONFLANG
Sam Boyer Grafana Labs
Media Attached
11:15
55m
Live Q&A
Configuration management: Q&A and discussion
CONFLANG

15:40 - 17:00
Closing: future of configurationCONFLANG at Zurich E
15:40
80m
Live Q&A
Structured discussion: future of configuration languages
CONFLANG

Call for Presentations

CONFLANG is a new workshop on the design, the usage and the tooling of configuration languages. CONFLANG aims at uniting language designers, industry practitioners and passionate hobbyists to share knowledge in any form. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Infrastructure and configuration code maintenance and evolution
  • Specification learning and mining for configurations
  • Infrastructure and Configuration testing and verification
  • Infrastructure as Code and configuration repair
  • New languages for configuration
  • The application of language security and type theory to program configuration

The committee welcomes proposals for presentations:

  • Traditional talks on any theoretical or practical aspect of the usage, the tooling and the design of configuration languages
  • Experience and case study talks on the real world usage and deployment of configuration languages
  • Explorative talks and/or demos on experimenting with configuration languages and related tools

Venue

While in-person presentations make sharing and interacting easier, please note that remote presentations are also considered due to the current health context.

Submission guidelines

Please submit an abstract (up to 600 words, excluding title, author names, and bibliography) of your proposed talk using the submission link provided below.

  • Format: 600 words maximum abstract (estimated between 1 and 1,5 pages) as a PDF, excluding title, author names, and bibliography. Any additional material will be considered at the discretion of the PC.
  • URL : https://conflang21.hotcrp.com/

Questions? Use the CONFLANG contact form.