The hosts are managed via chef, the jobs/tasks running on those hosts by something roughly equivalent to k8s.
As for the conflicts, I have to say I loathe the way the more dynamic part of configuration works. It might be the most ill conceived and poorly implemented system I've seen in 30+ years of working in the industry. Granted, it does basically work, but at the cost of wasting thousands of engineers' time every day. The conflicts occur because (a) it abuses source control as its underlying mechanism and (b) it generates the actual configs (what gets shipped to the affected machines) from the user-provided versions in a non-deterministic way which causes spurious differences. All of its goals - auditability, validation, canaries, caching, etc. - could be achieved without such aggravation if the initial design hadn't been so mind-bogglingly stupid.
But I digress. Sorry not sorry. ;) To answer your question, my personal solution is to take advantage of the fact that I'm on the US east coast and commit most of my changes before everybody else gets active.
