Engines, Puppets, Promises: The Figurations of Configuration Management

AbstractThis chapter examines the kinds of agency imputed to machines by the tradition of IT configuration management. While it is rarely examined by social or cultural studies of technology, IT configuration management is of profound importance in the story of cloud computing and recent paradigms of information security. Like infrastructure studies, configuration management took shape in relation to the pragmatics of managing “heterogeneous distributed computing” in the 1990s, and shares with Susan Leigh Star’s early work a concern with the problem of coordination in distributed systems. Given an obsession with figurative imagery in configuration management’s self-descriptions (engines, puppets, conductors, chefs, promises), I ask whether we can detect a shift here in how human-machine relations are figured, from one of control to one of stewardship.