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.
Do you want to learn more about CFEngine, and hear about the latest developments, tools, tricks and tips? Please join us for “The Guru is in: CFEngine” at LISA'12, a session where you will hear directly from CFEngine developers, engineers and power users. Some of the topics that we will discuss include the latest features in recent CFEngine releases, the CFEngine Design Center, and using Vagrant with CFEngine. Bring your own questions and topic suggestions too! Whether you are currently using CFEngine or just want to learn more about it, whether you are a newbie or an expert, we are positive you will find this session informative and interesting.
Earlier this year we made several proof of concepts to demonstrate that CFEngine can run on embedded and mobile devices. We compiled CFEngine for a devkit 8500 board, Android, QNAP and Raspberry Pi. Due to popular demand we have made the QNAP and Raspberry Pi packages publicly available, free to use for up to 25 nodes. This is an alpha version of Enterprise 2.2 compiled for these platforms, please be aware that we do not provide support for these packages. Official versions may be provided at a later point. Download them at https://cfengine.com/download
In todays environment where words such as virtualization, cloud and agility constantly buzz in our ears, enterprises look for ways to manage their increasingly dynamic infrastructure. The Cloud::Services sketch from the CFEngine Design Center implements a policy to manage virtual machines (VMs) on VMware vSphere 5 (ESXi). With this sketch, CFEngine can clone, start/stop, delete and configure VMs seamlessly alongside your physical infrastructure.
0. Why? CFEngine Enterprise collects very detailed, real-time information about the configuration of your IT Infrastructure. Splunk is an excellent enterprise search engine, engineered for speed, robustness, and scalability. You will learn how analyzing CFEngine logs with Splunk lets you see CFEngine data in new ways. You will learn how to access CFEngine’s logs, what information they capture and how Splunk’s “rex” command and other neat tools make that information accessible.
We will be holding some sessions at LinuxCon in San Diego this summer and will be very happy to see you there!
We just got a 15% off coupon to give away, but you need to act fast - it is good for the first 10 attendees and then it expires. The code is LFSD12345 - use it when you register for LinuxCon 2012 here.
We will be holding some sessions at LinuxCon in San Diego this summer and will be very happy to see you there!
We just got a 15% off coupon to give away, but you need to act fast - it is good for the first 10 attendees and then it expires. The code is LFSD12345 - use it when you register for LinuxCon 2012 here.
“A model is a lie that helps you to see the truth.” (Howard Skipper)
“There is nothing more practical than a good theory.” (Kurt Lewin)
The past year has seen a plethora, one might even say an entire movement, of talks and blog posts under the heading “Monitoring Sucks”. Plenty of valid criticisms have been made about the state of the art in monitoring. Back in 1998, I was similarly dissatisfied with the state of the art, and began to ask some basic questions that resulted in CFEngine’s present day tools for system monitoring. This article is a reminder of CFEngine’s smart, and extremely lightweight tools for de-centralized monitoring. These tools were designed to be adaptable, hands-free and to scale to tens of thousands of hosts, while handling machine-learning pattern matching, and responding automatically to thresholds and anomalies with minimal latency, with or without human intervention.
