Today’s financial services firms are operating in an IT environment of ever-increasing complexity, unprecedented regulatory requirements, and a need to move faster than ever before. In order to effectively compete in this new reality, firms are turning to IT automation as a way to scale their systems without sacrificing security, uptime, or compliance. Join us for a special webinar this Thursday July 17th to learn about the new CFEngine Enterprise 3.6.0 and how it can enable your IT organization to automate applications and infrastructure specifically for the challenges facing financial services firms today. Attend this live event to learn how CFEngine Enterprise 3.6.0 can enable your financial services organization to:
As any of you know, CFEngine was a proud Gold Sponsor of the Silicon Valley 2014 DevOps Days Conference last month in Mountain View, along with other industry-leading sponsors such as IBM, CA Technologies, Dell, and Red Hat. If you were unable to attend this sold-out event, we are pleased to announce that a recording of CFEngine CTO Mark Burgess’s talk on ‘The Future of Configuration Management’ is now available online! You can watch Mark’s talk here. To learn more about DevOps Days and find a future event near you, please check out the conference website. We hope to see you at the next event!
Thanks to all of you who tuned in for our ‘Introduction to CFEngine Enterprise 3.6.0’ Webinars last week. For those of you who could not attend, the recording is now available below - please be sure to watch and learn about CFEngine Enterprise 3.6.0 can help you:
Proactively alert on policy drifts in your environment through a simple-to-use, configurable dashboard Gain comprehensive visibility into your IT infrastructure with enhanced compliance and extensible inventory reporting Leverage new language abstractions to improve administration productivity Achieve painless integration with other IT systems using native JSON support
Join CFEngine partner Vertical Sysadmin for a free webinar this Thursday - Getting Started with CFEngine: Basic Concepts and Q&A. This event will cover topics from high-level system architecture to the anatomy of writing a promise to help you get productive quickly with CFEngine. Specific items to be covered include:
Basic terms - Promises, Bundles, Bodies, and Classes Language concepts Common promise types, attributes, and syntax Design Center sketches GUI features of CFEngine Enterprise Date: Thursday, July 10, 2014 Time: 9:00 am to 10:00am London UK, 4:00pm to 5:00pm Singapore (SGT) Register today!
Networking has become a utility in our daily lives, but it is still evolving as a platform for modern commerce. CFEngine has now taken networking beyond simple automation, by bringing modern self-repairing, model-oriented approaches to WebScale management at the IP layer. Network interface configuration is nothing new in the world of configuration management. CFEngine versions 1 and 2 were plugging the obvious hole in the out-of-the-box experience during the mid 1990s, before operating systems finally got their acts together. In 2007, CFEngine even explored Layer 3 WAN management (IP routing by any other name) as a member of the EMANICS network of excellence - but, back then, the market was not ready. The dominant networking vendors were still largely concerned with proprietary architecture, steeped in feature-based competition. However, the more recent arrival of Linux as a network operating system has changed that. The adoption and development of the Linux kernel by several companies has pulled down the vendor wall to let in Open Source. Significantly, for the industry, the growth fueled by Open Source has led to the birth of modern datacenter engineering, and DevOps. Recently, with the discussion of Software Defined Networking (SDN), and the arrival of DevOps in the networking space, several tool providers have waded into the world of Layer 2 networking - bonds, bridges and VLANs - which is the comfort zone of most system administrators. However, the historically complex Layer 3 routing services have thus far been neglected. In order to change this, CFEngine founder Mark Burgess has been working with Dinesh Dutt of Cumulus Networks to come up with a model of Layer 3 networking based on CFEngine’s Promise Theory approach to scalable management.
In this installment we turn to Jon Henrik Bjørnstad. In this particular piece read about configuring, and managing connected devices with CFEngine. If you have other such stories of CFEngine use, we would love to hear back from you. Thanks Jon Henrik for a great post! The world of partially connected devices forms the basis of both mobile IT and the much discussed Internet of Things (“IoT”). Hand-held tablets and phones equipped with applications for interacting with various services are merely the beginning of the pervasive computing experience, and smart home projects by Xerox, HP and Google merely underestimate the possible role of embedded devices in society at large. The Android operating system is based on a stripped down Linux kernel, and is highly portable. This open platform has spread to everything from television sets and refrigerators to cars and in-flight entertainment systems. This diaspora of partially-connected devices is the interaction point for users and contributes in no small part to creating WebScale workloads. Fortunately, the issue of configuration, security and maintenance in a partially connected environment is the natural domain of CFEngine due to its distributed architecture and lightweight autonomous agent. Self-healing configuration on the move CFEngine was designed with the world of embedded computing firmly in mind (see CFEngine founder Mark Burgess’ novel Slogans from 2005, if you want to see how Mark was thinking). Today, any device
Are you a CFEngine user in sunny Los Angeles interested in learning more about the new CFEngine Enterprise 3.6.0? If so, you should definitely look into attending a joint meetup being held by the LA CFEngine User Group and the League of Professional System Adminstrators (LOPSA) next Tuesday, July 8th, at 7pm in the Marina Del Ray area. CFEngine System Engineer Nick Anderson will be at the event to speak about some of the new and enhanced features of CFEngine Enterprise 3.6.0, such as enhanced inventory and reporting capabilities, improved templating, and new language abstractions. He will also be available to answer any CFEngine questions you might have. You can learn more and register here. We hope to see you there next week!
We had a fantastic webinar last month with CFEngine CTO Mark Burgess and guest speaker Forrester Research, Inc. Vice President and Research Director Glenn O’Donnell. During this wide-ranging discussion, Mark and Glenn discussed the concept of continuous operations, and how great service design combined with automation can empower organizations to survive and thrive in what is becoming know as “The Age of the Customer.” Mark also talked about Promise Theory and gave a short look at CFEngine Enterprise 3.6.0. Be sure to check out the recording here!
There is still time to register for one of our upcoming “Introduction to CFEngine Enterprise 3.6.0” webinars being held next Tuesday and Wednesday. By attending one of these live webinars, you will learn how CFEngine Enterprise 3.6.0 can help you:
Proactively alert on policy drifts in your environment through a simple-to-use, configurable dashboard Gain comprehensive visibility into your IT infrastructure with enhanced compliance and and extensible inventory reporting Leverage new language abstractions to improve administration productivity Achieve painless integration with other IT systems using native JSON support Please visit our registration pages to learn more and sign up today:
Are you interested in learning more about WebScale IT and its increasing relevance to the enterprise datacenter? If so, you should definitely check out the global online event ‘WebScale Wednesday’ being hosted this week by Nutanix. Our CTO and Co-founder Mark Burgess will be participating in this event alongside pioneers and practitioners from companies such as Dell, Twitter, and Citrix for an engaging and interactive discussion around WebScale IT and how it is making its way into the mainstream datacenter. The event stream live from 9am to noon this Wednesday, June 25th, and there are various sessions throughout the morning you can choose to attend. You can learn more about the agenda and speakers at the registration page here. Sign up before the event and get a free t-shirt - we hope to see you there!
