CFEngine is one of the most widely used infrastructure automation solutions in the world, being leveraged by some of the biggest organizations in the world for infrastructure management. eZuce is an Enterprise provider of Unified Communications, Voice and Video Conferencing solutions and is being used by many of their customers to improve business processes. eZuce has been shipping CFEngine inside of UniteMe since 2012 and have benefited from the following by using the popular configuration management solution:
- An easy to understand scripting language to modify the large amount of configuration files
- Easy and secure communications between servers
- Leveraging another open source project within eZuce’s open source project.
We did a brief Q&A with Michael Picher, VP of Product Innovation at eZuce, on their usage of CFEngine: CFE: Why did your team decide to use CFEngine as opposed to other infrastructure automation tools? MP: CFEngine was chosen for its lightweight footprint, and because it allows developers and end customers to easily modify existing policy and create their own recipes. CFE: What is the most obvious value (product delivery/product-to-market) achieved with CFEngine? MP: Implementing CFEngine facilitated reliable scaling for UniteMe clustering. After implementing cluster management with CFEngine cluster sizes were able to grow to more than double previous limits while remaining more stable due to lower system overhead. Addition of new nodes and scaling systems into the cloud was also greatly simplified. CFEngine was also able to provide automated management for services that previously had to be manually configured by customers. Now we are able to expose systems configuration in a friendly way via our user interface. CFE: What would you recommend to potential users of CFEngine in getting started? MP: Definitely check out the Getting Started section on CFEngine’s web site. There are tutorials, examples and some excellent blog articles to help give you a leg-up on your project. Find out more about eZuce at ezuce.com.
