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 no longer a newcomer, but a proven solution in datacentres around the world. With today’s launch, CFEngine 3 Enterprise leaves orbit and begins its voyage to manage an ever expanding universe of IT.
Low cost scalability and high performance and availability
At CFEngine, we strive constantly to maintain CFEngine 3’s position as the undisputed technology-leader in IT automation. With the focus today on IPv6, operational agilty, green IT consolidation, cloud and virtualization, that story begins with offering unprecedented performance. Low memory, CPU, and I/O footprints make CFEngine 3’s performance surpass competition by between 10-100 times, meaning that users can manage more hosts at a faster rate, with less hardware and smaller cloud instances, leading to considerably lower costs in the long run. This is a key differentiator for CFEngine in High Performance and E-Commerce shops.
In mission-critical environments, CFEngine 3 Enterprise also supports high availability of policy status, with login access to the Mission Portal available within seconds at all times. A CFEngine `hub’, gathers status reports and monitored information in a highly compressed format; moreover, repairs to desired state an average of 2.5 minutes away by default. Users choose their own scaling plan, depending on their available hardware; each hub will support several thousand hosts with our lightweight CFDB (CFEngine’s smart CMDB/SKMS replacement).
CFEngine’s attention to the close dialogue between automation and knowledge management, makes it the most advanced Third Wave IT management solution, looking ahead to the future needs of infrastructure engineers. Already today, CFEngine 3’s architecture has been designed to offer flexible federation in organizational control, with hosting of hubs possible both in public cloud, private datacentre, and even in the smart environments of the workplace.
Affording enterprise scale, complexity and insight
The technological benefits of the CFEngine 3 Community Edition are well documented, and they help users to automate the basics of Build, Deployment and Maintenance – but in an enterprise setting this is not enough – one needs the scaffolding of a knowledge system around IT to build trust.
The value of CFEngine 3 Enterprise lies not only in its high performance, allowing a low Total Cost of Ownership, but in its ability to model and document complex business requirements. Through this kind of modelling, we understand systems and learn to trust in predictable behaviour. Security scanning can easily be added for additional change management, and compliance monitoring is also a key requirement for complex enterprises. Condensing the enormous amounts of information down to a meaningful summary in scalable, timely and affordable manner is a principle goal of CFEngine 3 Enterprise.
Going forward, massively federated infrastructure will benefit from Project Constellation’s inclusion as a configurable part of the CFEngine 3 Enterprise unified toolset. Based on our user feedback, the initially proposed Nova, Constellation, and Galaxy editions will now be consolidated into this single project, allowing users the freedom to choose and customize the functionality they want.
Reporting on the actual state of IT infrastructure, and how it measures up against our desired (policy) state, with five minute accuracy, is the bedrock of a trusted computing platform. CFEngine 3 Enterprise does not require you to sacrifice any flexibility or precision of engineering to achieve this goal.
Federation of control is the modern way to avoid the blunt `one size fits all’ thinking of centralized control systems. Each federated hub, today, supports role-based access (RBAC) to its data, and each individual host supports role-based execution of special policy items. Thus complex organizations, with multi-cultural expertise can co-exist peacefully and with confidence. CFEngine 3 Enterprise offers the possibility of enhanced Chinese Wall separation between hosts and users that share access to a CFEngine Mission Portal.
DevOps and agile operations
Big enterprise customers are an area where CFEngine excels, but today the industry is being changed from below. The new wave of online web-based companies, has forced scale and agility to new heights. These businesses revolve around web services, where a simpler infrastructure often suffices, but continuous deployment of applications is a new source of complexity.
Several new initiatives are underway to integrate libraries of standard methods with fast deployment of virtual hosts in a hybrid cloud setting – in our Design Centre project. CFEngine 3 Enterprise adds superior knowledge management around this armoury of simple pluggable modules, and that integrated knowledge overview can be accessed through a REST API enabling integration of CFDB data with other strategic tools.
As always, we respect the cultural preferences of infrastructure engineers and their ways of working. Users can move easily from command-line interfaces (CLI) to the web-based Mission Portals. Reports can be found in the CLI console, or clicked through on the web from any device. In the Mission Portal, a model-based approach has been developed to give users individually customizable spanning-trees to navigate reports for arbitrary groups of hosts, in an intuitive way. Moreover, the integration of semantic web auto-analysis of policy puts diagnostic capabilities in the hands of smart engineers. These are just two examples of an envigorated drive to approach user-interaction development in a Third Wave knowledge-driven framework.
The DevOps manifesto touts CAMS as the principles of sound IT infrastructure management.
- Culture - supporting federated knowledge and unlimited diversity.
- Automation - fast, scalable, hands-free operations.
- Measurement - continuous observation with feedback to policy.
- Sharing - access to reasoned information and knowledge through multiple interfaces.
We think CFEngine 3 Enterprise addresses all of these points, and lays out a long-term roadmap for the changes to come.
Orchestrating complex environments with CFEngine 3 Enterprise
CFEngine installations number amongst the largest and most complex on the planet. Handling this complexity is not something that can be done by platform-building alone – orchestrating complex multi-faceted components on top of that base is an increasingly large part of the problem. Today, as we bridge the gap between physical and virtual infrastructure, complex multi-host orchestrations are still relatively difficult to achieve. This will almost certainly become easier as cloud-like infrastructures mature. In the meantime, CFEngine 3 Enterprise enables parallel and sequential task-orchestration across the environment using familiar class-based mechanisms of the core.
But centralized datacentres are not the desired end-state for all computing. The world of embedded devices is also on the rise, with pads and smart surfaces increasingly being powered by Linux derivative operating systems. CFEngine 3 scales so efficiently that it will run on even the leanest devices, for realizing the vision of smart environments. CFEngine’s basic design tolerance of being off-line makes it the way forward for managing the diverse flora of systems we are about to see blossom in the commerce of the coming decade.
Our recent integration work with QNAP storage technologies, Nokia, Android, ARM, wireless routers and other embedded systems, as well as more far-reaching ideas about smart infrastructure, has positioned CFEngine 3 Enterprise to be a unififying strategy for the true desired end-state of the Third Wave technology.
Now, it just remains to install it on yours!
