The LISA conference, run by the USENIX organization, is the largest conference specifically for system administration today. It has been 25 years in the running, and has been a cultural and professional center for the field of the system administration for most of that time. LISA is a unique haven for practitioners in the field, but it was also the place where modern theory emerged, driven largely by the efforts of a small group of individuals known as the ABC of system administration: Anderson, Burgess, Couch. CFEngine Founder Mark Burgess has been attending LISA since 1997.
LISA originally stood for Large Installation Systems Administration, then it became simply “LISA” and most recently the long title has been revived. This year, LISA celebrated its 25th birthday, and chose the forward looking theme of DevOps, which many believe marks a change in the way system administration will be done in the future, characterized by greater agility. CFEngineers contributed, as always, in many sessions at the conference, from tutorials to plenum talks, and exhibition hall demonstrations, prominent in their distinctive Third Wave T-shirts.
Keynote - DevOps
LISA Keynote speaker Ben Rockwood, of Joyent, gave an inspiring presentation expanding on the idea of DevOps as mere application deployment (as is often assumed in discussions of configuration management tools) to provide a historical and philosophical perspective spanning the 20th century.
Rockwood’s view of DevOps was more in line with CFEngine’s vision of the future of system administration, bringing a wider view on the subject, though perhaps not everyone was as enamoured as we were.
Rockwood traded remarks with CFEngine Founder Mark Burgess in questions, commenting on Alvin Toffler’s Third Wave interpretation of society and DevOps. He generously credited Mark with ‘kicking off’ the technologies for DevOps, though was careful to point out that DevOps is not specifically about tooling.
Scale and scalability
For CFEngine, the message this year was all about scale and complexity. For some time now, we have been expounding the importance of running CFEngine to manage infrastructure at all scales, from the very small the very large, or full-spectrum coverage for configuration management.
On Tuesday evening we were delighted to see a room full of people at our BoF session.
- Sigurd Teigen presented the ‘CFEngine on Android’ proof of concept, showing how CFEngine could run on these still immature devices.
- Jon Henrik Bjørnstad showed a live demo of CFEngine running on an
embedded device that was built, configured and tested within less
than a week by the technical team in Oslo.
- Jon Henrik further showed how CFEngine 3 Nova can be used to manage a simple private cloud based on KVM kernel virtualization on Linux, without any special technology other than a standard Linux distribution. This improves on basic private cloud deployment tools by adding CFEngine’s special brand of self-healing monitoring and repair to virtual machine instance execution.
- Finally, showing that we take usability and education seriously, Joe Netzel presented a preliminary draft of a policy wizard - a tool that guides you to create simple CFEngine 3 policies with a graphical user interface.
CFEngine 3 and Business Alignment
We wanted to meet our audience, and we were not disappointed. On Monday we had a very successful CFEngine 3 tutorial by Mark, that got people who were still running CFEngine 2 itching to migrate to CFEngine 3.
The second tutorial, A Sysadmin’s Guide to Navigating the Business World run by Mark Burgess and Carolyn Roland (NIST) was not specifically about CFEngine, but one of the key phenomena of the Third Wave is the dialogue between commerce and information. This packed tutorial was about opening system administration to the idea of working with business, as a strategic partner, rather than merely for it as a slave.
At the exhibition, LISA attendees couldn’t get enough of CFEngine – and booth attendance overshadowed most of the other booths at the exhibition. Wednesday had people coming to greet us and hang out at our booth, wanting to see the embedded device and android demos. How to migrate from CFEngine 2 to CFEngine 3 was a popular question.
Dipping into The Third Wave
On Wednesday, Founder and CTO Mark Burgess was introduced as a ‘provocative thinker’ to a packed room for an invited talk session. With quirky hand-drawn cartoons, Burgess presented `3 Myths and 3 Challenges to Bring System Administration out of the Dark Ages’, and argued that some basic changes were needed to move system administration from industrial-age over-simplification to a state of true information age engineering agility.
A meeting of minds and friends
Ultimately, LISA is a technofest, where friends and colleagues meet. Many of the attendees have known each other for years, and about two thirds each year are completely new. For the CFEngine family it was also an opportunity to huddle, uniting the US and Norwegian offices, and hanging out with our friends from Opscode, NIST, USENIX and Oslo University College, as well as newcomers that we bonded with in the hallways.
It’s only 12 months to go before @LISA12, next year in San Diego, and there are many more conferences before then!
