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:
| 1 | 10 | 1294 |
| 2 | 100 | 344 |
| 3 | 1000 | 66 |
| 4 | 10000 | 8 |
On a log-log plot this is almost a straight line, indicating a natural power law, of the kind a Professor of Networking would expect. This is a sign of classic organic growth, and shows that big organizations tend to get bigger by accretion, while the majority of organizations are small.
