In spite of being publicly sceptical of cloud computing as a technological concept CFEngine author Mark Burgess announced that CFEngine will support machine and service virtualization within its framework of convergent promises, in order to facilitate the kind of adaptive utility computing that is a growing presence in datacenters. “Elastic adaptation is the one aspect of what is being called Cloud Computing that I see as a real technological challenge,” he added. “I have done some research on this with Alva Couch of Tufts University, while he visited Oslo on sabbatical last year, and we have some interesting twists to bring to the table – without letting the cat out of the bag yet.” Initially, CFEngine will interface with popular virtual machine APIs, such as VMware, KVM and others in order to provide basic VM management in a simple way.
Following a sustained effort by the programming team at CFEngine AS, CFEngine Nova (the commercial version of CFEngine 3) will run natively on Windows NT platforms (not merely emulated under the Cygwin framework), with first release just into the new year 2010. Support has been added for registry management and Windows Access Control Lists, as well as integration with Event Manager and other goodies.
The plans over the next year include further integration of CFEngine with Active Directory and its group policies. CFEngine still has something to offer Windows users, even with the new tools that Microsoft is bringing to Windows 2008. One thing is integration of Windows resources into the CFEngine Knowledge Map, but also there is the ability to manage security through ACLs, and implement group policies convergently over time (not just one-off), as well as to integrate with a major Unix management system in a universal framework. Early rumours of the release have already led to a flurry of interest for the upcoming software release from a number of companies internationally.
New features have been added to the CFEngine development tree, both Community Edition and CFEngine Nova, for list manipulation. The grep() function takes a list and extracts elements that match a given regular expression, returning a sublist. The join() function, which complements splitstring() function, takes a list and returns a scalar string with elements separated by a delimiter. These functions provide Perl-like operations that reduce the dependence on external scripting. List manipulation is a key enhancement in CFEngine 3, and forms a core paradigm for reducing configuration complexity.
Mark Burgess Presents at Google By Brendan Strejcek - Mon, 26 Oct 2009
Mark Burgess recently gave a presentation on Promise Theory and CFEngine 3 at Google on his way to LISA 08.
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Brendan Strejcek talks CFEngine and configuration management with the founders of other open source tools at Open Source Bridge in Portland.
http://blip.tv/play/g9pogYvuGwI
Original Post
The cover feature of the April 2009 issue of Linux Pro Magazine is a tutorial I wrote for introducing CFEngine 3.
You can download the full text of the article in PDF format.
“A Promising Approach to Management” is the subtitle of an essay written by Mark Burgess that develops the philosphy that has made CFEngine a flexible and successful solution for autonomic computer management. But there is more to this essay than a cute jingle. According to its author, we should think less about the details of our technologies and more about the promises we make.
Download the full PDF of the essay.
