format(): sprintf semantics in CFEngine
by Ted Zlatanov - May 16, 2013
If you are a programmer, you probably know and maybe even love the sprintf family of functions.
I wrote an implementation called format()...
New Output Format
by Sigurd Teigen - May 13, 2013
Last week, we revamped the way CFEngine formats output. You can continue to use the old output format by specifying the option --legacy-output (-l), but this is considered deprecated and may be removed in a future version.
IT-Organizations Face Disruption - Automation to the Rescue
by Thomas Ryd - May 09, 2013
IT-organizations around the world face constant pressure to do more, do it faster and with fewer resources. They are seen as cost centers and as such benchmarked against the performance of nimbler competitors and the public cloud providers.
IT-organizations feel that pressure from multiple sources at the same time. The CFO compares his internal IT-budgets with the costs of public cloud offerings and demands comparable savings. The lines of business know they can get the latest applications and platforms within minutes in the public cloud and complain about the slowness of their internal IT department. And the end-users expect continuous availability of all IT-services. Add Moore's law to describe the growth in scale and complexity of the IT infrastructure, and it becomes understandable why CIOs have the shortest tenure of all C-level executives.
Syntax warnings
by Sigurd Teigen - April 26, 2013
Over the past month we have removed a bit of functionality for CFEngine. These were features that were useful (cf-report) and good ideas (knowledge management), but the implementation was either in an unfinished state or the design had unclear semantics (outputs promise type).
A Case Study in CFEngine Layout
by Brian Bennet - April 15, 2013
I've been working a lot with CFEngine newbies. CFEngine has been described as flour, eggs, milk and butter. All the ingredients needed to make a cake. Getting the new CFEngine user to recognize, then become excited about the possibilities that CFEngine provides they are now faced with the question of "What next?"
Indeed, anybody can throw some flour, eggs, milk and butter into a bowl, mix and bake it. But will it taste good?
This is an exposé of how I have managed my CFEngine repository for more than eight years. This design was used to manage over 1,000 host instances.
This works best if you have an agile infrastructure. Use SmartOS, OpenStack, Amazon EC2 (Disclosure: I work for Amazon), CloudStack or similar.