We’re just back from FOSDEM, the Free and Open source Software Developer’s Europe Meeting in Brussels. For the second year in a row there was a DevRoom for Configuration Systems Management, with room for about 80 people, and long queues outside the door during every talk. Five of us (Alexandra, Geir, Mark, Sigurd and I) went down to the continent to listen to inspiring talks, meet with the infrastructure engineering community and enjoy strong, Belgian beer. Big shout-out to the organizers of FOSDEM in general and the DevRoom in particular, and to the folks at Puppet Labs and Opscode for co-sponsoring the Saturday evening dinner together with us!
The reoccurring themes that I heard this Saturday, brought up more or less explicitly in every talk throughout the day, were not surprising:
- infrastructure needs to be testable, self-explanatory code
- provisioning tools like vagrant have arrived in the mainstream of infrastructure engineering
- software-defined infrastructure is a reality
What does this mean for CFEngine? If Software Defined Infrastructure becomes the new reality, then we should make the tools that we have enjoyed for years in software engineering also available to infrastructure engineers! Debugging and linting configuration policies; automated testing of infrastructure code on a unit, system and acceptance level (Bryan Berry’s talk on Integration Testing); integration with software configuration management and continuous integration tools. And lastly, measuring everything we can, and analyzing the data in the context of the model of the system we want to build and the business goals we have. Our friends at Normation gave a great talk about how they use CFEngine 3 and Rudder to keep track of security-oriented rules not when the auditor is at the door, but every minute!
I was happy to see that this is well aligned with many of our current activities in CFEngine development! I’m looking forward to the upcoming DevOpsDays in Europe and to FOSDEM 2014 where we can hopefully show some of the things we are working on right now!
