I had a thought-provoking article by Rachel Shannon-Solomon forwarded to me. Essentially the article states that while DevOps is great for startups the enterprise isn’t ready for it yet. I’ve read/heard people disagreeing with this but I think the article raises some great points. At DevOpsDays Austin I presented a session on why it isn’t realistic to expect enterprises to become just like startups when adopting DevOps. There’s a lot of technological and cultural complexity present in legacy enterprises that just aren’t an issue in startups. DevOps practitioners from startups don’t seem to have an answer either, quit your job and move to a startup might be a solution for an individual but it certainly doesn’t help with DevOps adoption in the enterprise. Setting aside the cultural difficulties of doing DevOps in the enterprise there’s the not so small issue that a lot of the tools available are suitable for startups but unproven and dare I say often unsuitable for the enterprise. Some vendors have been extremely skilled at attaching themselves to DevOps and trying to morph DevOps into something that helps them sell products. Unfortunately this doesn’t change the fact that software isn’t going to solve your DevOps adoption problem, in fact I would say some of the solutions I have seen presented can make matters worse. I’ve heard multiple times that being a Director of DevOps or a having similar title isn’t ideal because it implies that the person is responsible for the success or failure of DevOps in an organization. I agree with that in any type of organization. The problems DevOps is trying to address span multiple organizational units and it takes much more than one person with a fancy job title and a mandate to “do DevOps” to make changes in the enterprise. Those of us who believe that the DevOps movement can make a difference in the enterprise have a responsibility to recognize challenges faced. Let’s stop pointing out how awesome DevOps works in startups and get together to bring DevOps to the enterprise. Perhaps it is the DevOps movement that isn’t quite ready for the enterprise. The good news is that there are people who passionately believe in helping bring DevOps to the enterprise. I believe their work will help transform the DevOps movement into something more enterprise friendly while still keeping the spirit of DevOps.
Companies of all sizes are under pressure to succeed in competitive environments requiring them to move faster with expectations of always-on service from their IT organization. However, these same IT groups are faced with significant challenges from manual processes, homegrown patchwork solutions, disparate systems, and other legacy problems. In order to overcome these issues, companies need to automate their infrastructure in an intelligent way to keep up with the pace of the business while at the same time providing a secure and stable environment to deploy complex multi-tier applications to local or cloud infrastructure. By implementing a solution that enables continuous operations, companies can gain complete visibility and alert capabilities that can automate compliance checks, audits, and remediation using a policy-based approach. Join us for a discussion on Thursday June 19th at 10am PT / 1pm ET / 6pm GMT featuring guest speaker, Forrester Research, Inc. Vice President and Research Director Glenn O’Donnell **** and CFEngine Co-Founder and CTO Mark Burgess as they talk about the principles of continuous operations and how complete visibility combined with phased deployment rollouts can minimize risk and maximize uptime. Most importantly, you’ll also learn about how you can get started on implementing continuous operations within your organization. We hope to see you there! CLICK HERE TO REGISTER TODAY Speakers: Glenn O’Donnell, VP and Research Director Serving Infrastructure & Operations at Forrester Research Glenn serves Infrastructure & Operations Professionals. He is widely regarded as a top thought leader in IT service management, IT operations, and the broader social implications of technology evolution. Glenn’s specialties are in data center automation and operational excellence. He is the co-author of The CMDB Imperative, a book on CMDB best practices. Mark Burgess, Founder and CTO at CFEngine Mark Burgess is the creator and main technical architect of the popular CFEngine open source IT automation software. He was the first person internationally to hold the title of ‘Professor of Network and System Administration’, at Oslo University College. He now leads the research and development of the CFEngine software full time.
Once again DevOpsDays Austin was a fantastic event. This was the DevOpsDays event that I have been to that had two tracks. One track for what I would call traditional DevOpsDays sessions that focused on culture and organizational change, the other with more practical advice on how to get things done. I took the opportunity to get something off my chest that has been bothering me a bit about DevOpsDays and other DevOps events in general. I presented an ignite session titled “Why DevOpsDays (and other DevOps events) is failing both horses and unicorns”. Essentially I proposed that focusing on Amazon, Etsy, Facebook and Netflix so much wasn’t really helping the horses (aka the enterprise). Essentially there was a proposal and a reminder in the ignite: 1. Let’s stop using the regular DevOps idols as examples and replace them with stories from other companies. If there aren’t any other success stories then are we really making a difference at DevOpsDays events? 2. For the unicorns presenting always think about how what you are presenting applies to people in more traditional companies. Don’t just say “if you can’t do awesome in your current company quit your job and come work with us”. That’s not particularly helpful I didn’t really expect a positive reaction to the session but was pleased that it resonated with people. If the evolution of DevOpsDays Austin over the past few years is anything to go by I’m really looking forward to seeing how other DevOpsDays events will evolve over the source of the year. Next up is DevOpsDays Pittsburgh. CFEngine is sponsoring and I’ll be there to spread the word about CFEngine! Hope to see you in Pittsburgh!
Yesterday, I had an amazing opportunity to participate in the inaugural Internet of Things (IoT) Expo held at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. The event was conceived by Jeremy Geelan who is also behind the highly successful Cloud Expo events. The IoT Expo was well attended with many excellent keynotes and product demonstrations. Among others, industry leaders such as Tony Shakib (VP, IoT vertical at Cisco), Omri Lachman (Co-Founder and CEO Humavox), and Joe Speed (Director of IoT at the Linux Foundation) gave us very compelling insights into what IoT can achieve, its potential, as well as issues that still need to be solved for. Later in the day, I participated in a panel discussion with Peter Moskovits (Kaazing) and David Nielsen (Cloud Computing Evangelist and Consultant) around the following questions:
In a few days I’ll be flying to Austin to attend DevOpsDays Austin. It was an awesome event last year and CFEngine is proud to be sponsoring the event. I’m looking forward to participating in open space sessions and hearing about the latest challenges, tips and tricks people have to share. It will also be my first chance this year to talk to people in person to see if DevOps is making advances in the traditional enterprise (aka horses) instead of just hearing about Netflix, Amazon, Etsy, Facebook (aka unicorns). See you in Austin!
We are pleased to announce that CFEngine Founder Mark Burgess will be speaking at the next Silicon Valley DevOps meeting about the future of configuration management. At the meetup you will not only learn about the future of Configuration Management as Mark sees it but also have the chance to network with some of the best and brightest in Silicon Valley who are passionate about DevOps and Configuration Management.
Inventory management in 3.6, part 1 - Showing variables and classes CFEngine 3.6 introduces a set of features for inventory management, and we’ll have a closer look at one of them today. This feature is part of both the Community and Enterprise editions. It essentially outputs the inventory in terms of classes and variables at a local node. Have a quick look at cf-promises -h of 3.6:
cf-promises -h Usage: cf-promises [OPTION]… [FILE] Options: –eval-functions, - value - Evaluate functions during syntax checking (may catch more run-time errors). Possible values: ‘yes’, ’no’. Default is ‘yes’ –show-classes, - - Show discovered classes, including those defined in common bundles in policy –show-vars , - - Show discovered variables, including those defined anywhere in policy –help , -h - Print the help message … You might see the two new options –show-classes and –show-vars. Let’s test them out.
A couple of days ago we informed you of the status of the CFEngine products and services with respect to Heartbleed. Today we would like to share with you some instructions and policies that you can use to check your systems for vulnerable versions of OpenSSL, and if needed upgrade it to its latest version. If you already have CFEngine deployed, adding this policy and deploying it to your systems takes only a few minutes, after which CFEngine will take care of performing the necessary checks and updates on your systems, whether you have a few or tens of thousands. If you are not using CFEngine yet, you can still use these policies to check it out, and run the fix by hand on your systems. These policies work for Ubuntu and RedHat-based systems (including CentOS). See below for some hints about how to customize it for other operating systems.
CFEngine is a proud sponsor of the Red Hat Summit next week in downtown San Francisco! If you are attending the event, be sure to visit us at Booth #116 to say hello and learn more about new features of CFEngine 3.6 as well as get special discounts for our upcoming user conference, Promise2014.
You can also join us for some drinks and snacks on Tuesday night at a Meetup we are hosting at Jillian’s next door to the conference. Be sure to visit our Meetup page for more information and to sign up.
As you may know, a serious vulnerability was recently announced in OpenSSL, commonly referred to as Heartbleed or more officially by its CVE ID CVE-2014-0160. This vulnerability affects the OpenSSL heartbeat mechanism and allows unauthorized access to private data including encryption keys, encrypted traffic and more.
At CFEngine we use OpenSSL both in our infrastructure and in our products. The security of our users and customers is one of our primary concerns, so we immediately began investigating the possible impact of this bug. Here are our findings:
