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:
The Host Info Report has been available in CFEngine Enterprise for some time, it will now be available to community users in CFEngine 3.6. The Host Info Report is a great way to get value immediately if you are using CFEngine for the first time.
So what does it do? The Host Info Report contains detailed information on the host that CFEngine is running on. Read on to learn more about how to enable and use the report.
Over the next few months we’ll be blogging about some of the great features, enhancements and bug fixes coming in CFEngine 3.6. All too often new software is released without anyone taking the time to tell you what’s been done and why it matters.
To start the series we have a blog post by Nick Anderson on the new Host Info Report in the community edition.
Check back each week to learn more about CFEngine 3.6.
We are quickly becoming a more software defined world. The music, movie, automotive and telecoms are examples of industries going through disruptiveness due to innovative software defined products. In this new world, IT-operational efficiency has risen to be more critical to businesses than ever.
Thanks to software and open source, the world is a more transparent place. Innovation is as much about speed as it is about coming up with that great next new idea. In efficient markets, ideas are quickly copied. The best way to stay ahead of competition is to continuously bring new products and services to market. The value of speed at which a company introduces new products and improves new versions based on market feedback has become paramount to success. The world accelerates in its need for new products and services. The connected- and smart-phone based economies emerge as the leaders of this new world-order, where new versions of products are introduced to the market on weekly, and even daily basis.
My name is Jonathan Thorpe and I recently joined CFEngine to work with the CFEngine community. I’ve spent the past 15 years or so working in several different roles ranging from development, build maintenance, management and finally onto community and customer facing roles.
When I got the opportunity to work with the CFEngine community it was a very easy decision to join CFEngine. While I’ve only been on the job for a week I’ve had an amazing experience so far. Scale was my first show with CFEngine and I came back extremely energized and enthusiastic about the CFEngine community in SoCal.
