Mahesh Kumar, VP Marketing CFEngine
The CFEngine team was at LISA 2013 in Washington, D.C. this past week. It was the perfect setting, the weather playing nice, and having some of the sharpest minds talking about their accomplishments in the large installation system administration space.
There were training sessions earlier on as the conference started on the 3’rd of November. Wednesday’s proceedings were kicked off by Jason Hoffman, Founder, Joyent. Jason regaled the packed audience with his talk about ‘Modern Infrastructure - The convergence of network, compute and data’. It was very well delivered and informational.
CFEngine participated across a variety of avenues at Lisa 2013. From the team, Mark Burgess, Diego Zamboni, Nick Anderson, Tom Buck and myself attended.
Diego co-presented with Mike Svoboda of LinkedIn. Mike spoke about how LinkedIn uses in-memory caches to solve operations questions. Questions such as ‘where does the httpd process run’, ‘who has a network connection to machine Y’ etc. LinkedIn is using CFEngine to answer some of these questions at scale, efficiently and in real time! You can watch the actual presentation here We also had some good press coverage that picked up on Mike’s presentation. You can read EnterpriseTech’s Timothy Prickett Morgan’s indepth coverage of this talk.
Another talk I really enjoyed was on ‘Surveillance, the NSA and Everything’. This was delivered to a standing room only audience by Bruce Schneier, *Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet and Society. *With the NSA being in the news recently this was timely and very informative. Bruce is both a master of this domain, as well as someone who can argue and present his point across in a very compelling fashion. This was on display given he was not even physically at the conference. He delivered his talk via skype and still got a standing ovation at the end of it.
We had a steady stream of visitors to our booth. It was good to meet and speak with CFEngine users as well as the curious who wanted to know more about the technology and the problems it solves. We kicked off the evening with a ‘Birds of a feather session’. Mark Burgess started it off with a short ‘state of the CFEngine nation’, followed by a loose and open, but very energetic discussion. Topics ranged from cloud, to software defined networking, to integration and support for OEM offerings (both storage and network). The packed room enjoyed s’mores and beer.
Mark and Diego also signed their books on the show floor on Thursday. All in all a great show for LISA and for CFEngine. We have more happening in the next few weeks. Velocity London is fast coming up and so are Dev Ops days in the UK. Khushil Dep will be presenting. This is one presentation you don’t want to miss! There is also a meetup planned for that same week, as well as a keynote from Mark for Dev Ops days. November has been busy and we are just getting warmed up here at CFEngine!
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