In spite of being publicly sceptical of cloud computing as a technological concept CFEngine author Mark Burgess announced that CFEngine will support machine and service virtualization within its framework of convergent promises, in order to facilitate the kind of adaptive utility computing that is a growing presence in datacenters. “Elastic adaptation is the one aspect of what is being called Cloud Computing that I see as a real technological challenge,” he added. “I have done some research on this with Alva Couch of Tufts University, while he visited Oslo on sabbatical last year, and we have some interesting twists to bring to the table – without letting the cat out of the bag yet.” Initially, CFEngine will interface with popular virtual machine APIs, such as VMware, KVM and others in order to provide basic VM management in a simple way.
CFEngine already runs on VMWare ESX Servers, and CFEngine Nova (the commercial version of CFEngine 3) will include special features to integrate with the VMware APIs directly, providing convergent automation to the world of virtualization. This step brings two of the most popular server management solutions a step closer together.
See also The Cloud Minders by Mark Burgess in the April 2009 issue of Login.
