Guest Blog - WebScale Computing at the Flick of a Wrist
In this installment we turn to Jon Henrik Bjørnstad. In this particular piece read about configuring, and managing connected devices with CFEngine. If you have other such stories of CFEngine use, we would love to hear back from you. Thanks Jon Henrik for a great post! The world of partially connected devices forms the basis of both mobile IT and the much discussed Internet of Things (“IoT”). Hand-held tablets and phones equipped with applications for interacting with various services are merely the beginning of the pervasive computing experience, and smart home projects by Xerox, HP and Google merely underestimate the possible role of embedded devices in society at large. The Android operating system is based on a stripped down Linux kernel, and is highly portable. This open platform has spread to everything from television sets and refrigerators to cars and in-flight entertainment systems. This diaspora of partially-connected devices is the interaction point for users and contributes in no small part to creating WebScale workloads. Fortunately, the issue of configuration, security and maintenance in a partially connected environment is the natural domain of CFEngine due to its distributed architecture and lightweight autonomous agent. Self-healing configuration on the move CFEngine was designed with the world of embedded computing firmly in mind (see CFEngine founder Mark Burgess’ novel Slogans from 2005, if you want to see how Mark was thinking). Today, any device
