Mahesh Kumar, VP Marketing CFEngine
mahesh.kumar@cfengine.com
The CFEngine team was at LISA 2013 in Washington, D.C. this past week. It was the perfect setting, the weather playing nice, and having some of the sharpest minds talking about their accomplishments in the large installation system administration space.
There were training sessions earlier on as the conference started on the 3’rd of November. Wednesday’s proceedings were kicked off by Jason Hoffman, Founder, Joyent. Jason regaled the packed audience with his talk about ‘Modern Infrastructure - The convergence of network, compute and data’. It was very well delivered and informational.
Mahesh Kumar, VP Marketing CFEngine
@mahesh_CFE
mahesh.kumar@cfengine.com
Hello Everyone! It is not too often that one gets to join a company with solid fundamentals when it comes to technology and one that finds itself as the change leader in an area that is evolving real-time (DevOps and Continuous Delivery). Well, I am thrilled to report that I am onboard here at CFEngine as their VP of Marketing.
In the days ahead I will be reporting back frequently on the cool things we are doing here at CFEngine. Such as recently winning an award from JPMC that you can read more about in our blog. Of course we could speak about the ground breaking and innovative areas we are focused on here at CFEngine such as continuous delivery and continuous operations. However I am getting ahead of myself. I wanted to use this post to introduce myself as well as talk about the recent Velocity and DevOps Days events in NYC.
A while ago, work was started on a new promise type in CFEngine, the “users” promise type. What it does is make promises about which users are supposed to be present on each host, what login credentials they have, what groups they are part of, and so on. This has traditionally been something one would have to write in the CFEngine policy using system commands, but with this new feature it becomes a much more convenient and robust solution for users management.
Some software is more opinionated than others. If it ever made sense to anthropomorphize software, the CFEngine agent would be a good candidate. A CFEngine installation is a society of independent agents, each with their own goals, schedules and limited view of the world, individually doing their best under current weather.
Mark Burgess’ new book ‘In Search of Certainty’ may be viewed as a popular anthology for the design considerations that went into writing CFEngine. To that end, we are taken on a fast paced journey through topics such as classical and quantum mechanics, information theory, game theory and biology. It is clear that Mark had a lot of fun writing this book, drawing on and connecting dots of an eclectic array of examples from everyday life. Along the way, questions about how to design good tools are explored from a physicist point of view.
The CFEngine team is excited to present - CFEngine Week in New York City, October 14-18!
During that week we will be out in force in the Big Apple. Come meet us in one of the many events we are organizing or sponsoring:
Velocity Conference, Oct 14-16: Most companies with outward-facing dynamic websites face the same challenges: pages must load quickly, infrastructure must scale efficiently, and sites and services must be reliable, without burning out the team or breaking the budget. Velocity is the best place on the planet for web ops and performance professionals to learn from peers, exchange ideas with experts, and share best practices and lessons learned.
Authored by Remi Bergsma - http://blog.remibergsma.com
Back in June, just before I went off for holiday, I attended a CFEngine training in Amsterdam. When I returned from holiday a few weeks later, me and my team started making plans to implement CFEngine in our environment. After two months of hard work, I’m proud to say we manage about 350 out of our 400 Linux servers with CFEngine!
The ride has been fun, although not always easy. In this post I’ll give a quick overview of our CFEngine implementation, where I found useful info, etc.
CFEngine 3.5.2 is now available for download. This is a maintenance release of CFEngine 3.5, and introduces a number of fixes and improvements to both Community and Enterprise editions. New functionality has been included to the SQL builder and the Design Center integration in Mission Portal.
Changes in CFEngine Enterprise:
MongoDB has been upgraded to version 2.2.4 monitoring data has moved into a separate database - see db-move-monitoring-to-cfmonitor.js script to migrate data Improvements to the Mission Portal:
Every year, on the last Friday of July, we pause for a moment and think about the impact of system administrators on our world. It is hard to imagine how different our life would be if it was not for the sysadmin. The goal of the Annual SysAdmin Appreciation Day is to make us all think about that and find ways to express our appreciation for them. At CFEngine we know many of them. In the past weeks we have interviewed hundreds of them and we want to share some fun facts we have discovered which show why they deserve our appreciation.
CFEngine 3.5.1 is now available for download. This is the first maintenance release of CFEngine 3.5, and introduces a number of fixes and improvements to both Community and Enterprise editions. New functionality has been included to the SQL builder and the Design Center integration in Mission Portal.
Community repositories will be updated shortly.
Core Changes:
the CFEngine Standard Library in masterfiles/libraries is now split into promise-type specific policy files, and lives in a version-specific directory. This should have no impact on current code, but allows more granular include of needed stdlib elements (Redmine #3044) file changes are logged with log level Notice, not Error Bug fixes:
After work and discussion, the CFEngine developer team produced https://github.com/cfengine/core/pull/784 to make libraries/cfengine_stdlib.cf compatible with 3.4.x and older again, to modularize it, and to improve the upgrade experience. These changes will be in the upcoming CFEngine 3.5.1 release:
libraries/cfengine_stdlib.cf is now 3.4-compatible again, so upgrading will not break existing CFEngine installations. lib/3.5 and lib/3.6 contain the standard library with changes that require 3.5.x and 3.6.x, respectively lib/3.5 and lib/3.6 have multiple files instead of a single cfengine_stdlib.cf. This is the same content as the cfengine_stdlib.cf content, but split by promise type (e.g. lib/3.5/files.cf has file-related bodies and bundles). common.cf has promise bodies common to all promises, e.g. action and classes paths.cf has a utility common bundle called paths that lets you say, for instance, “$(paths.path[rpm])” instead of hard-coding the location of the RPM manager executable. 3.5.1 and newer will have new variables to store the CFEngine major, minor, and patch version separately. It all works just like before 3.5.0, except you don’t have to include a huge library. If you just want to set classes for a promise, include common.cf. If you just want process filters, include processes.cf.
