Talks and Presentations by the CUE Team

The CUE team regularly gives talks and presentations about CUE all across the world, and online - here are links to recordings of some of them. You can also check out the official CUE YouTube channel where we regularly upload our community calls, conference talks, and live streams: youtube.com/@cuelang

2025

• The CUE registry: Versioning Now and Beyond
  [ CfgMgmtCamp Ghent, February 2025 | Synopsis ]
  We show how the CUE registry allows reproducible sharing of configuration and how this registry serves as a platform for unified configuration management – Marcel van Lohuizen and Roger Peppe

2023

• Getting the Most out of your Policies with CUE
  [ Open Core Summit, San Francisco, December 2023 | Video ]
  Policy enforcement has been increasingly used to manage admission control, address security concerns, as well as a myriad of other applications. Policies typically contain information that is useful beyond the enforcement infrastructure and could be used, for instance, to prevent outages or improve documentation. But the typical siloed nature of such systems prevents such information from being used for these purposes. CUE takes a different angle to policy definitions that breaks these silos. We demonstrate several use cases by means of an example system. – Marcel van Lohuizen

• Go << CUE: Shifting Go left with CUE
  [ GoLab Conference, Florence, November 2023 | Video ]
  Where does your Go run? How do you tell it what to do? Configuration is a huge part of modern development but while we benefit from Go’s static type system to catch programming errors early, we don’t have the same for configuration data. This talk explains how the new CUE language integrates with Go, “shifting left” your Go types to earlier stages of deployment, reducing risk while bringing joy – Roger Peppe

• CUE + Terraform
  [ Online, June 2023 | Video | Synopsis ]
  The CUE project has been experimenting using CUE to drive Terraform to configure our GitHub organisations and repositories. Jonathan and Paul will share progress from this experiment, beginning with a demo of the running system and followed by Q&A – Paul Jolly and Jonathan Matthews

• CUE: A Type System for the Cloud
  [ Craft Conference, Budapest, May 2023 | Video ]
  CUE has an uncanny ability to act as an ad-hoc type checker that keeps things in check between loosely-coupled arbitrary systems that independently produce and consume data without knowing about each other. In this session we’ll do a full tour of CUE, its syntax, semantics, and features. Aram will show you how you can use CUE to increase your confidence in your systems while simultaneously increasing development velocity – Aram Hăvărneanu

• CUE: A glimpse into the future of configuration engineering
  [ CfgMgmtCamp Ghent, February 2023 | Video | Synopsis ]
  Configuration has become the number one complexity problem to solve. Every part of your tech stack – databases, apps, schemas, services, workflows, policy, models, networking – must be configured. We show how CUE can help unify these silos – Marcel van Lohuizen

2022

• Taming Configuration Complexity Made Fun With CUE
  [ QCon Plus, San Francisco, December 2022 | Video+Synopsis ]
  Marcel van Lohuizen discusses configuration at scale including the design of CUE, how configuration can go wrong, the need for testing and validation, and how CUE does holistic configuration – Marcel van Lohuizen

• A Practical Guide To CUE: Patterns For Everyday Use
  [ FOSDEM 2022, Online, May 2022 | Video | Synopsis ]
  In this talk, Marcel van Lohuizen and Paul Jolly start with a quick overview of CUE the language, then move on to present practical examples of CUE in action, including common patterns for validation, policy, integration with existing non-CUE configuration and more. Because CUE is new, established patterns are still in the making, but at the very least it will be a reflection of the current thinking – Marcel van Lohuizen and Paul Jolly

• Pulumi YAML and the CUE language
  [ PulumiTV, Online, May 2022 | Video ]
  Join us for this live Modern Infrastructure as David Flanagan and Paul Jolly show you how to use CUElang to describe your cloud infrastructure for Pulumi – Paul Jolly and David Flanagan

2021

• Using CUE with GitHub Actions
  [ Online, December 2021 | Video ]
  Paul Jolly welcomes guest Michael Gasch to demonstrate how to use CUE with GitHub Actions. We demonstrate how to set up your project to configure GitHub Actions with CUE, and avoid writing a single line of YAML! – Paul Jolly

• Large-Scale Engineering of Configuration with Unification
  [ Splash 2021: Conflang, November 2021 | Video ]
  In this talk we introduce CUE: a new aspect-oriented, constraint-based configuration language that deploys a more formal approach to configuration aimed at solving many of the issues that persist with more conventional approaches. You will leave with an understanding of the CUE language, and an appreciation of how it can help mitigate the challenges associated with large-scale configurations. – Marcel van Lohuizen

• CUE Town Hall #1
  [ Online, October 2021 | Video ]
  The CUE project’s inaugural town hall event – Paul Jolly and Marcel van Lohuizen

• Dev Tool Time with Paul Jolly: What CUE Can Do For You
  [ Dev Tool Time, Online, October 2021 | Video ]
  In this episode of Dev Tool Time, Paul Jolly (a CUE maintainer and creator of govim) walks us through what CUE can do for you – Paul Jolly

• Hands-on Introduction to CUE
  [ Rawkode Live, Online, April 2021 | Video ]
  In this episode, Marcel and David will teach you everything you need to know to get started with CUE – Marcel van Lohuizen and David Flanagan

• CUE: Configuration Superpowers for Everyone
  [ Go Time Podcast, Online, January 2021 | Audio+Synopsis ]
  “Go Time” Episode #163 – Marcel van Lohuizen, Paul Jolly, and Roger Peppe

2020

• Better APIs with Shareable Validation Logic
  [ GopherCon Europe, Online, July 2020 | Video ]
  Validating data at various points, like in clients and servers, is desirable. But keeping validation logic in sync between, say, Go code and OpenAPI is prone to errors and toil. CUE addresses this issue with the ability to convert and combine various formats. This allows for some cool and exciting rewriting capabilities, such as generating a single documented OpenAPI spec from various sources and automated compatibility checks. It addresses the issue that validation logic can often not be consolidated into one place or format – Marcel van Lohuizen

2019

• CUE: A Data Constraint Language and shoo-in for Go
  [ GopherCon Russia, 2019 | Video ]
  A configuration language needs to balance compactness with complexity. Most languages end up being too complex for the value they provide. We show that inheritance is the culprit and provide an alternative: constraints. CUE’s constraints describe configurations more compactly while at the same time validating them. As a separate thread throughout the talk, I’ll explain how the idea for CUE was conceived, and why it wasn’t implemented before – Marcel van Lohuizen