Having joined CFEngine only a few months ago (and being new to the Open Source movement and culture), attending our Bay Area meetup allowed me to come face to face with our community and hear about CFEngine deployment from the people who use it as their main tool. And let me tell you, there are some serious CFEngine warriors out there! In this blog post I will feature two of them. By pure chance both of them are called Bruce, but don’t worry, it’s not a prerequisite to be called that to join our community!
Bruce Carlton, who organized the meetup, is a systems administrator at TRUSTe. He started using CFEngine in 2008 and quickly became an enthusiast. He likes to come up with analogies that will help describe CFEngine to non-technical audiences and explain its declarative nature. One analogy that he is still perfecting is to traffic signs that are declarative and assume that the driver is able to decipher them and act accordingly, versus traffic lights that are imperative and impose a command on the driver. To build on the same road traffic analogy, the declarative nature of CFEngine allows it to find its own route towards the desired destination, as opposed to an imperative tool that will get nowhere if one of the roads in its predetermined route is blocked.
The other Bruce, Bruce Rafnel, is now with Equifax, where he was introduced to CFEngine eight years ago and expanded its use dramatically, including an upgrade to CFEngine 3 when the company moved its infrastructure to the cloud. Bruce made an excellent case for the scalability of CFEngine - because CF Agents are pulling policies from the hub, as opposed to the policy server pushing policies onto agents, the entire system is utilizing resources more efficiently, if only because a server will not try to make changes where there are none to be made.
We all felt that the evening was very successful and that a meetup is a great way to share our CFEngine experiences and stories, as well as learn from each other’s deployment of CFEngine and its use cases. Personally, I am looking forward to the next meetup and calling on all of you to follow our website announcements and tweets for information on events to come.
