Upgrading from CFEngine 2 to CFEngine 3 is easier than you think!
In this Webinar, we will go through the steps required to successfully upgrade your CFEngine 2 environment to CFEngine 3. Topics covered in this Webinar will include:
Promise Theory and Convergence - How they are utilized in CFEngine 3 New features of the CFEngine 3 Language Migration strategies Policy translation - From Files to Bundles and beyond Validation, Testing and Rollout methods Q&A Session So, if you are currently running CFEngine 2 in your environment and are considering a move to CFEngine 3, please view this Webinar. (Recorded on Wednesday, February 13, 2013)
At CFEngine we frequently meet companies that save millions of dollars annually as result of working with our tools.
In addition to improved productivity and increased quality of service, automation will make your IT-operations more cost effective. Actually, in order to stay competitive, I would argue that highly automated IT-operations is the only way for IT-organizations to meet the agility and cost requirements of today.
Automate or die
IT-operations that are not highly automated will not be able to keep up with expected productivity, quality of service and costs.
We’re just back from FOSDEM, the Free and Open source Software Developer’s Europe Meeting in Brussels. For the second year in a row there was a DevRoom for Configuration Systems Management, with room for about 80 people, and long queues outside the door during every talk. Five of us (Alexandra, Geir, Mark, Sigurd and I) went down to the continent to listen to inspiring talks, meet with the infrastructure engineering community and enjoy strong, Belgian beer. Big shout-out to the organizers of FOSDEM in general and the DevRoom in particular, and to the folks at Puppet Labs and Opscode for co-sponsoring the Saturday evening dinner together with us!
Today we released our first monthly release! The January edition of CFEngine Enterprise and Community is now available to those who want to see what we are currently working on. The releases are called 3.1 alpha1 and 3.5 alpha1, respectively - and as the name suggests, this is work in progress. We have built packages for Enterprise and tested a small set of platforms: CentOS 5/6, RHEL 5/6, Ubuntu 10.04. Customers find the packages in a subdirectory “alpha_releases(unstable)” in their download area on cfengine.com.
When we reflected in our team about what worked and what didn’t work so well during 2012, one thing stood out: the changes from release to release are too big, and that makes it bloody hard to test that everything works once all the different moving pieces are put together. Core functionality, policy language, upgrade policies, mongodb and apache configurations for enterprise, package names and content - any part moving without the other parts being adjusted will quickly lead to a frustrating experience for everybody.
Happy New Year 2013, and welcome to the CFEngine Developer Blog! On posts tagged with Development, the guys and gals working on the CFEngine code will share their thoughts about current challenges, ongoing improvements and completed features. The nature of this information will by definition be technical and at times more interesting for those with a software development background than for system engineers. This will be news from the “bleeding edge” rather than announcements of production-ready features - more on that, and how we are changing our release operations in 2013, in a separate post!
Since writing my earlier post on (Model based monitoring), I have talked to many users who encouraged me to describe CFEngine’s simple capabilities in more detail. Although CFEngine is not intended as a traditional monitoring platform, it offers a considerable amount of human-friendly information, with a model that could be a hint of the future. At CFEngine, we like to innovate, and this post offers some hints about how we are thinking.
Automation of IT-operations can lead to fantastic productivity gains, increased quality of service and reduced operational costs. But what about the people, and their jobs?
System Administrators will not become obsolete, but the nature of their work often changes in highly automated environments. The ones who adapt typically enter into more proactive roles. The ones who willingly or unwillingly are left behind, end up fighting fires and home made scripts, until they will eventually be replaced. This evolution should not be viewed as a threat, but as an opportunity.
This post originally appeared on Dyn.com, written by Neil Schelly @neilschelly
We’ve recently made some big strides at Dyn in implementing a more modern configuration management platform (CFEngine 3) to replace an internally developed system that wasn’t meeting our needs anymore.
Reading about the options out there inevitably leads you to see comparisons of many tools to fill this need. I found myself also learning about several myths regarding implementing configuration management.
Software developers know that quality of software projects tend to deteriorate over time unless strong measures are taken to prevent this. Software entropy accelerates once the beginning of “software rot” has been allowed to set in, so the trick is to keep the software as clean as possible at all times. This is referred to as “The Broken Windows Theory” because the pattern is similar to what police departments learned about maintaining order in inner cities: fix the small things all the time, and so keep out the big problems.
