Today CFEngine releases the latest version of its commercial enterprise software for configuration management and IT operations.
In addition to all the usual power of scalable and convergent system configuration, CFEngine 3 Nova brings a higher level of information awareness to system administrators at very low cost.
Resource efficiency takes on a new importance as users increasingly work in the Cloud where every CPU cycle is billed. The CFEngine mantra of “Lightweight! Lightweight! Lightweight!” has pushed the new release even further in the direction of resource efficiency. Considerable improvements in network efficiency have also been achieved, allowing reporting of many thousands of hosts every 5 minutes to a single hub aggregator - far in advance of other solutions.
*“If only you’d attached my legs, I wouldn’t be in this ridiculous position.” - C3PO, Star Wars*
Like most successful post-war technologies, the IT innovations that flourish today are those that bring freedom (in the broadest sense) to individuals. From the Italian scooter, to the American refrigerator, or the latest ability to communicate through an almost endless variety of interfaces and models, it is the desire to be set free that drives the commerce of technology.
It is always a surprise to me how many people leave college with the feeling that they learned nothing useful during their time there – with the attitude that theoretical learning and historical context (what distinguishes a college education from a mere training course) bear no relevance to the “real world”. This, of course, is nonsense.
Worse, many students go to work for organizations where the workplace culture turns them into battery hens, with every trace of individuality exorcised. Or perhaps industry norms and standards define the way employees have to behave. Where did the appreciation of education go, and what does it really mean?
CFEngine is an inexpensive life-support system for complex and mission critical IT infrastructure…
Every year the world spends billions on risk avoidance – safety and backup equipment, security systems and even insurance policies against loss and liability. For many of us, the risk of serious loss is quite small (though still sufficient to keep insurance companies in business) but in some industries the consequences of loss are so serious that even a small risk is unacceptable.
Moving into a new year, the privately owned and funded CFEngine company has changed its board to include some power members of the Free and Open Software community. “The time has come to change the style of our board work, as we move into a different phase of growth,” says CEO Thomas Ryd.
Joining the board is Open Source superstar Haavard Nord, former co-founder and CEO of Trolltech, the Norwegian company behind the Qt library, and the basis for KDE. Trolltech (which translates roughly into “technology magic”) was recently acquired by Nokia as a strategic part of their software development.
How big are existing CFEngine installations? Until recently, this question was mostly of interest to people researching approaches to automation and scaling.
It is also challenging to obtain good data from users as many users under-quote the number of machines they manage. Often this is to avoid attracting attention to themselves. Nevertheless, since forming the cfengine company, we have been collecting data from CFEngine users, weeding out obvious nonsense, such as users who report 9999 systems, or 123456. The results reveal a picture that makes a lot of intuitive sense, so we can be confident that it is correct. Simplified into orders of magnitude, we have:
