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Mark Burgess

Self-Repairing Deployment Pipelines

Or what we should mean by Distributed Orchestration Orchestrating complicated distributed processes is an unfamiliar aspect of computing that leads to all kinds of confusions. We are not taught how to do it in college, so we end up trying to apply any methods we are taught, often in inappropriate ways. Promise theory paints a very simple picture of distributed orchestration. Rather than imagining that a central conductor (controller) somehow plays every instrument by remote magic wand, in an algorithmic fashion, promise theory says: let every player in an ensemble know their part, and leave them all to get on with it.

Posted by Mark Burgess
August 5, 2014

What is WebScale and how does CFEngine help you achieve it?

This is a term often used today to acknowledge the extraordinary growth of the major web companies over a decade (social media, retailing, games, cloud etc) from handfuls of machines to the largest installations on the planet. The major web players today have datacenters with 10,000, 100,000 and even 1,000,000 computers serving their operations. Of course, this kind of growth is not appropriate for everyone. WebScale often goes together with quite singular or focused applications, by contrast with very complex industries that have to support thousands of applications for different lines of business.

Posted by Mark Burgess
June 2, 2014

CFEngine and the future of monitoring

Since writing my earlier post on (Model based monitoring), I have talked to many users who encouraged me to describe CFEngine’s simple capabilities in more detail. Although CFEngine is not intended as a traditional monitoring platform, it offers a considerable amount of human-friendly information, with a model that could be a hint of the future. At CFEngine, we like to innovate, and this post offers some hints about how we are thinking.

Posted by Mark Burgess
December 28, 2012

Model-based monitoring with CFEngine

“A model is a lie that helps you to see the truth.” (Howard Skipper) “There is nothing more practical than a good theory.” (Kurt Lewin) The past year has seen a plethora, one might even say an entire movement, of talks and blog posts under the heading “Monitoring Sucks”. Plenty of valid criticisms have been made about the state of the art in monitoring. Back in 1998, I was similarly dissatisfied with the state of the art, and began to ask some basic questions that resulted in CFEngine’s present day tools for system monitoring.

Posted by Mark Burgess
June 10, 2012

CFEngine 3 Enterprise is leaving dry-dock ...

Today, the CFEngine team is announcing CFEngine 3 Enterprise. With the major part of the CFEngine 3 technology being in an open source core, our exploratory commercial edition, was originally dubbed `CFEngine Nova’ – the `New star in configuration management’. Today, CFEngine 3 is no longer a newcomer, but a proven solution in datacentres around the world. With today’s launch, CFEngine 3 Enterprise leaves orbit and begins its voyage to manage an ever expanding universe of IT.

Posted by Mark Burgess
May 29, 2012

Scale and scalability

If someone asks you about the scalability of your operations, don’t tell them about the number of machines you run; tell them rather about what it costs you to tend them each month. The total cost of that burden can be summed up from the cost of hardware, software, maintenance, people, lost revenue during downtime, time lost during maintenance, and time wasted from not managing knowledge well. At one customer site, CFEngine replaced an old second wave push-package provisioning system from one of the major vendors, with a lightweight CFEngine automatic maintenance framework, exchanging 200 hosts and a team of sysadmins in the push-framework for 5 CFEngine servers run by a single man.

Posted by Mark Burgess
May 22, 2012

Ten Reasons for 5-minute configuration update and repair

How often should your configuration management system verify the integrity of your system? The default choices we’ve made by CFEngine are the results of almost 20 years of research into this area. Below you will find ten issues and references that explain why these choices are underpinned by the science. These ten things really all amount to the same thing: if you are playing ping-pong against the adversary of change, you need to be as quick on your feet as your opponent – and faster

Posted by Mark Burgess
March 19, 2012

What makes clouds float and developers operative? Agility!

In an office, high above New York City, we are looking at the screen of a computer, discussing the how the recent blog entry on CFEngine, SysAdmin 3.0 and the Third Wave of IT Engineering applies to the challenges of institutional agility on Wall Street and beyond. `Speed is the product,’ says R. R is a CFEngine customer from a large, and heavily regulated organization, that has been choked with bureaucracy and process management.

Posted by Mark Burgess
January 6, 2012

CFEngine, SysAdmin 3.0 and the Third Wave of IT Engineering

PART I: the sysadmin poverty trap The Third Wave of human society is an age where knowledge and information drive prosperity. Parallel to the changes that pushed humanity through major industrialization in manufacturing are developments happening in IT management today, some thirty years behind the manufacturing industry. CFEngine and its users have been a primus motor for these changes – helping to transform old techniques into a knowledge-based approach to IT – and we are celebrating this new chapter with the announcement of CFEngines Nova and Constellation.

Posted by Mark Burgess
November 2, 2011

CFEngine - The Third Wave of Configuration Management

If you have been anywhere near a Unix system in the past ten years, you will almost certainly have heard of CFEngine and its ‘revolutionary, self-healing approach’ to datacentre automation. However, what you might not know is that its current third incarnation CFEngine 3 is both younger and more advanced than most of its imitators, harnessing the very latest ideas about system management – and the difference is all about knowledge.

Posted by Mark Burgess
November 1, 2011
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