We’re just back from FOSDEM, the Free and Open source Software Developer’s Europe Meeting in Brussels. For the second year in a row there was a DevRoom for Configuration Systems Management, with room for about 80 people, and long queues outside the door during every talk. Five of us (Alexandra, Geir, Mark, Sigurd and I) went down to the continent to listen to inspiring talks, meet with the infrastructure engineering community and enjoy strong, Belgian beer. Big shout-out to the organizers of FOSDEM in general and the DevRoom in particular, and to the folks at Puppet Labs and Opscode for co-sponsoring the Saturday evening dinner together with us!
Today we released our first monthly release! The January edition of CFEngine Enterprise and Community is now available to those who want to see what we are currently working on. The releases are called 3.1 alpha1 and 3.5 alpha1, respectively - and as the name suggests, this is work in progress. We have built packages for Enterprise and tested a small set of platforms: CentOS 5/6, RHEL 5/6, Ubuntu 10.04. Customers find the packages in a subdirectory “alpha_releases(unstable)” in their download area on cfengine.com.
When we reflected in our team about what worked and what didn’t work so well during 2012, one thing stood out: the changes from release to release are too big, and that makes it bloody hard to test that everything works once all the different moving pieces are put together. Core functionality, policy language, upgrade policies, mongodb and apache configurations for enterprise, package names and content - any part moving without the other parts being adjusted will quickly lead to a frustrating experience for everybody.
Happy New Year 2013, and welcome to the CFEngine Developer Blog! On posts tagged with Development, the guys and gals working on the CFEngine code will share their thoughts about current challenges, ongoing improvements and completed features. The nature of this information will by definition be technical and at times more interesting for those with a software development background than for system engineers. This will be news from the “bleeding edge” rather than announcements of production-ready features - more on that, and how we are changing our release operations in 2013, in a separate post!
This post originally appeared on Dyn.com, written by Neil Schelly @neilschelly
We’ve recently made some big strides at Dyn in implementing a more modern configuration management platform (CFEngine 3) to replace an internally developed system that wasn’t meeting our needs anymore.
Reading about the options out there inevitably leads you to see comparisons of many tools to fill this need. I found myself also learning about several myths regarding implementing configuration management.
Do you want to learn more about CFEngine, and hear about the latest developments, tools, tricks and tips? Please join us for “The Guru is in: CFEngine” at LISA'12, a session where you will hear directly from CFEngine developers, engineers and power users. Some of the topics that we will discuss include the latest features in recent CFEngine releases, the CFEngine Design Center, and using Vagrant with CFEngine. Bring your own questions and topic suggestions too! Whether you are currently using CFEngine or just want to learn more about it, whether you are a newbie or an expert, we are positive you will find this session informative and interesting.
Earlier this year we made several proof of concepts to demonstrate that CFEngine can run on embedded and mobile devices. We compiled CFEngine for a devkit 8500 board, Android, QNAP and Raspberry Pi. Due to popular demand we have made the QNAP and Raspberry Pi packages publicly available, free to use for up to 25 nodes. This is an alpha version of Enterprise 2.2 compiled for these platforms, please be aware that we do not provide support for these packages. Official versions may be provided at a later point. Download them at https://cfengine.com/download
In todays environment where words such as virtualization, cloud and agility constantly buzz in our ears, enterprises look for ways to manage their increasingly dynamic infrastructure. The Cloud::Services sketch from the CFEngine Design Center implements a policy to manage virtual machines (VMs) on VMware vSphere 5 (ESXi). With this sketch, CFEngine can clone, start/stop, delete and configure VMs seamlessly alongside your physical infrastructure.
0. Why? CFEngine Enterprise collects very detailed, real-time information about the configuration of your IT Infrastructure. Splunk is an excellent enterprise search engine, engineered for speed, robustness, and scalability. You will learn how analyzing CFEngine logs with Splunk lets you see CFEngine data in new ways. You will learn how to access CFEngine’s logs, what information they capture and how Splunk’s “rex” command and other neat tools make that information accessible.
We will be holding some sessions at LinuxCon in San Diego this summer and will be very happy to see you there!
We just got a 15% off coupon to give away, but you need to act fast - it is good for the first 10 attendees and then it expires. The code is LFSD12345 - use it when you register for LinuxCon 2012 here.
