CFEngine has played a major role in allowing Facebook to scale from one dormroom server to the largest datacenters of the world. Tom Cook explained it all with high velocity. “Velocity 2010 Conference” It’s June, at the Velocity 2010 conference in Santa Clara, California, and Facebook Systems Engineer Tom Cook provides a glimpse inside the daily life of the Operations team. An important part of the job at Facebook is systems management. He tells us: Facebook chose CFEngine as their configuration management solution. It gives their engineers peace of mind.
GNU/Linux is taking over the embedded device market, bringing Open Source flexibility and superior Unix management techniques to distributed, partially connected, and nomadic environments. Associate Professor Erik Hjelmås of Gjøvik University College in Norway has been experimenting with the latest CFEngine on a Nokia N900 mobile phone. If there is one thing that characterizes the 21st century so far, it must be mobility: mobile phones, mobile internet, mobile people. The tools of system administration, on the other hand, by and large assume that infrastructure is fixed and rooted to predefined subnets and domains.
University of Oslo transforms desktops with CFEngine on Ubuntu CFEngine and Ubuntu go back to College Users at Oslo University will soon be offered the Ubuntu operating system on their laptops and desktop machines, and it will come with fully automated CFEngine management.
The University of Oslo Computing Service (USIT) has always been quick to embrace developments in Unix system administration. It was in this milieu that CFEngine founder Mark Burgess originally conceived the automation software in 1993. Now CFEngine is the most popular solution for hands-free automation around the world, and USIT is forging ahead by bringing the Ubuntu (GNU/Linux) operating system to its users.
Zenoss is fast becoming a recognized leader for commercial open source monitoring. It offers a single model-based product to seamlessly manage physical, virtual and cloud based infrastructure. Its power lies in its flexible combination of network discovery and data presentation, and it makes an ideal partner for CFEngine’s under-the-hood self-healing technology.
CFEngine’s famous lightweight, hands-free approach to system administration grew significantly in 2008 with the release of its Nova product. CFEngine is designed to ensure compliance with a system model, and one of the features CFEngine Nova added was a simple reporting capability for the compliance level of the individual systems. So why CFEngine and Zenoss together?
p>When Ubuntu LTS Server Edition made the radical decision to offer Long Term (five year) support for its server edition software, it sparked the potential to make a significant impact on data center mangagement. Upgrading servers is one of the most disruptive operations in a data center because it means down-time. Now you might never have to take down a machine during its entire lifetime.
Perhaps a pipe dream? But, with a little luck, not so far from the truth as you might think. Today, thanks to package management, the bulk of patching and upgrading of a system can be done while the machine is live. This means the prospect that one might actually avoid taking down a machine to reinstall it for the entire life of the physical server is actually within reach, assuming that no critical kernel patches are needed.
Cloud woes? CFEngine made its Orion Cloud Pack available last week, as a 1-2-3 quick-start for users of its CFEngine 3.0.x family of products. Continuing the astronomical theme of the company, the page sports the slogan “Get the cloud under Orion’s belt” – a reference to the M42 Nebula in which is located, where else, just under the famous three stars of Orion’s belt.
3-2-1 Launch! “The Cloud Pack is a jump-start kit for the cloud,” explains CEO Thomas Ryd. “The idea is to make it completely trivial to get started with managed services. CFEngine is unique in not only making installation easy, but also in bringing hands-free repair to the problem. It’s especially important to have self-healing technology when your computer might be half-way across the world.”
Psyching yourself up for an upgrade to CFEngine 3? You’ve probably convinced yourself that it is harder than it is. CFEngine allows you to decide between high and low level approaches. High level often means simplistic or inefficient, but low level can be overwhelming – there is a balance to be struck. In this article, we start from the bottom up and list some of the most basic low level idioms you’ll have used before in CFEngine 2, to show you how they can look in CFEngine 3. These are basic capabilities from which all high level approaches can be built, without the need for user-scripting. Then, using CFEngine 3’s “ACL paradigm” you will be able to scale these easily for most needs…
The Netherlands are well known for pushing the boundaries of IT to support scientific initiatives. The Dutch Supercomputing Centre SARA (Stichting Academisch Rekencentrum) is one of the top 500 supercomputing sites in the world and has been an ardent CFEngine user for many years. In keeping with this cutting edge profile, SARA has been turning to the latest developments in CFEngine to offer cloud services to Dutch researchers.
More players are beginning the realize the benefits of the kind of model-driven configuration thinking that CFEngine introduced in the 1990s. Today, this kind of pre-programmed, policy-based configuration and repair are becoming essential partners for the commoditization of computing services in the Cloud. CFEngine has been there since before the beginning, and it still doesn’t care where your computer is located.
CFEngine introduced the idea of what is now called `model driven' configuration in the early 1990s. Although the name changes (e.g. policy driven, declarative, etc) the idea is still very simple: instead of describing procedural changes, you describe the desired state or outcome for your system.
The Joint Australian Tsunami Warning Centre’s Earthquake Monitoring component at Geoscience Australia recently adopted CFEngine’s newest worldwide software release to radically simplify the management of their test and production real-time monitoring systems.
With so many earthquake events along the Indo-Australian plate, and the risk of equally catastrophic Tsunami waves, Tsunami warnings are a mission critical service in the area. The recent 7.4 magnitude earthquake in Aceh, Indonesia sparked fears of Tsunami along the recently hard-hit areas around the Indian ocean, though major Tsunami usually result from much larger events.
