Last week we attended Config Management Camp in Gent Belgium.
How did automation start? In the beginning Mark split light from dark…
There were 7 talks in the CFEngine devroom. Christian
Linden kicked things off with his presentation “Get set for getting
work done by
CFEngine”.
He covered the basics of what you need to know when getting started with
CFEngine as well as some tips to help in debugging policies. After
Christians Kickoff I talked about “Testing CFEngine
Policy”.
Why you should test, currently available testing frameworks, how to get
started writing tests that produce TAP and or JUnit output and finally
how to expand CFEngines test coverage while contributing to examples in
the documentation. Martin Simons wrapped up the first day with his talk
“CFEngine Hero of
IoT”.
Martin brought a Raspberry Pi running Raspbian told us how he is using
it to implement a motion-activated security system built with commodity
hardware at home and then demonstrated how CFEngine can easily manage it
and deployed a tomcat application. The main topic of conversation on
Tuesday was data. How to separate it from policy, how to make use of
external data, and how it can make your life easier in
SURFsara. Bas van der Vlies
started us off with his talk “How to use the augments file
(def.json)”.
He showed how he defined a host specific data file that let him easily
override default values for a specific service/bundle.
He
discussed how this has had great benefits for non CFEngine users in his
environment, allowing them to easily identify which service/bundles are
activated for a host and exceptions that each host is overriding. Next
Jurica Borozan talked about “Merging Technologies, ideas on using
CFEngine with cloud and container
technologies”.
He discussed how his tag based classification system enabled host
specific policies to be delivered and the varying ways that this common
model could be applied to physical systems, docker containers, and cloud
hosts leveraging the features available in each technology stack.
He
finished up by demonstrating his policy that managed maintaining a
specific number of AWS instances for a given image and how a simple
change in his data source (a json file) resulted in nodes being
provisioned or destroyed within 5 minutes. Neil Watson gave a short
remote talk “CFEngine Simplified with
EFL”.
He discussed the design philosophy of EFL and how you can leverage the
framework to get things accomplished with CFEngine without having to
know any policy. I wrapped up talks with a short presentation on “The
Masterfiles policy Framework: A short history and future
direction”.
I presented the lineage of the current policy framework, how we got to
where we are today and how data (the augments file def.json) is very
much at the core of how we expect to improve usability and ease future
policy framework upgrades without having to edit policy.
Special thanks to Christian, Martin, Bas, and Neil for sharing your
thoughts and presentations. We look forward to seeing everyone again
next year!
