The CFEngine policy analyzer is an awesome new service introduced in CFEngine 3.13. The policy analyzer allows you to quickly debug policies and inspect what is going on under hood of CFEngine. A known challenge with CFEngine, and most DSL based automation tools, relates to understanding what is actually going on during live operations. Many users view it as “black-box magic”. Unfortunately, the amount of magic and the size of the black box increases with the level of automation.
Today’s approach to securing IT infrastructure is passé. In a dynamic world of unpredictable and often frequent infrastructure changes, the traditional approach to security falls short. It is no longer sufficient to just scan frequently for vulnerabilities and then try to interpret this data in real time without (human) error. Additionally, despite smart analytics, this approach to illuminating security issues and remediating them is extremely time consuming. How many organizations can really claim to have identified and fixed all vulnerabilities?
As someone responsible for IT operations, you have probably spent most of your time thinking of ways to improve your team’s effectiveness and efficiency to make it more competitive. At CFEngine, we have witnessed the management of IT infrastructure and organizations operating across the spectrum of the performance scale. Where are you on that scale and how can you improve? In the world of IT operations, a negatively skewed distribution seems to exist.
If you are working for a Fortune 2,000, and hold P&L, or in other ways are responsible for the compensation levels of your SA team and have doubts answering this question, I will argue your operations are not automated, nor will it be competitive in tomorrow’s IT-operations market. The industry unites around the belief that automation is the only way to stay on top of IT Operations. Automation has become a prerequisite for supporting the business in their growing demands.
Young and fearless, Born Digital Organizations (BDOs) now seriously challenge incumbent businesses, business models and value chains across industries. These digital organizations set new standards when it comes to frequency of new product features, cross channel compatibility, 24/7-365 availability, customer customization, user-interface friendliness and price points. Attributes of Born Digital Products:
Frequent (daily) product updates Work across all channels Always on Aware of its user(s) Friendly user-interface More affordable (often product-as-a-service) Clunky products with infrequent updates that is not fully compatible across various channels or always available for consumption face a dark future in a world of less loyal customers.
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Thanks to Mike Svoboda at Linkedin and a league of experienced CFEngine users, we are happy to announce the “CFEngine Office Hour”. Meet with CFEngine folks, bring your questions! Here is what to expect: “Instead of lecturing about how we’ve used CFEngine, the focus of this office hour is dedicated to helping you!” “Have you ever had a question that you wanted to ask, but didn’t want to blast it out on the mailing list because its too public?
This post clarifies whether CFEngine is affected by the newly published vulnerability in the SSL protocol,POODLE. CFEngine core functionality, i.e. agent-to-hub communication is not affected in any way by the POODLE vulnerability. If the protocol version is set to “classic” or “1”, or is just left to be the default, then all communication happens using the legacy protocol which has nothing to do with SSL. If it is set to “latest” or “2”, then TLS version 1.
We are quickly becoming a more software defined world. The music, movie, automotive and telecoms are examples of industries going through disruptiveness due to innovative software defined products. In this new world, IT-operational efficiency has risen to be more critical to businesses than ever.
Thanks to software and open source, the world is a more transparent place. Innovation is as much about speed as it is about coming up with that great next new idea.
William Gibson once said: “The future is here, but it is not evenly distributed”. Within the space of IT-operations and automation we see clear evidence of this. Last week at LISA, System Engineer Mike Svoboda from LinkedIn gave us a glimpse of insight into the future of infrastructure operations.
The lucky audience got to learn how LinkedIn automates IT-operations at one of the largest websites in the world. What LinkedIn has achieved with less than a handful of engineers the last couple of years is truly bleeding edge.
