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 …
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 …
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 …
“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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
In an office, high above New York City, we are looking at the screen of a computer, discussing 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. …
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 …
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 …
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