In an office, high above New York City, we are looking at the screen of a computer, discussing the how the recent blog entry on CFEngine, SysAdmin 3.0 and the Third Wave of IT Engineering applies to the challenges of institutional agility on Wall Street and beyond.
`Speed is the product,’ says R.
R is a CFEngine customer from a large, and heavily regulated organization, that has been choked with bureaucracy and process management. He has just explained how deploying a server has gone from taking 3-6 months, to taking just a few minutes, thanks to his new CFEngine-based process. The present moves faster than the past, and the future moves even faster than that. By casting off by-gone vestiges of industrialized mass production in favour of Third Wave individual customization, he has turned a bureaucratic mess into an inexpensive triumph.
The LISA conference, run by the USENIX organization, is the largest conference specifically for system administration today. It has been 25 years in the running, and has been a cultural and professional center for the field of the system administration for most of that time. LISA is a unique haven for practitioners in the field, but it was also the place where modern theory emerged, driven largely by the efforts of a small group of individuals known as the ABC of system administration: Anderson, Burgess, Couch. CFEngine Founder Mark Burgess has been attending LISA since 1997.
At Tuesday night’s CFEngine Meet-the-Team BoF session at LISA, Joe Netzel, one of CFEngine’s talented Systems Engineers, showed off a small app that he has been building in his spare time to help new users become more comfortable developing their own CFEngine policies.
In Joe’s own words: “The CFEngine Policy Wizard attempts to bridge the gap between established concepts that are second nature to System Administrators – such as setting file permissions, process management and software installation – by offering a side-by-side comparative view of the CFEngine syntax.”
***Eystein Måløy Stenberg ****provides a sneak-peek into “Project Constellation”, new CFEngine Nova technology under development that will expand the universe of configuration management by integrating network, server and mobile management, as well as support both geographic diversity and massive scale.
*
The Single Star
CFEngine 3 supports a wide variety of network architectures today, in environments with both reliable infrastructure and unreliable or mobile connectivity. The most common architecture is the “Star Network”, where you have one central hub responsible for sharing policies and collecting reports from all other hosts. This is the default network architecture adopted by CFEngine 3 Nova.
***Editor’s Note: Packt Publishing has just come out with a new title, “The CFEngine 3 Beginner’s Guide”. In this guest blog, the book’s author, Rajneesh, gives an overview of the subject, his motivations, and its intended audience. *
The publisher kindly offers blog readers access to a free e-chapter and a discount for purchasing the book.
[The opinions expressed in this blog are the writer’s own. CFEngine AS does not endorse or validate its content.]
PART I: the sysadmin poverty trap The Third Wave of human society is an age where knowledge and information drive prosperity. Parallel to the changes that pushed humanity through major industrialization in manufacturing are developments happening in IT management today, some thirty years behind the manufacturing industry. CFEngine and its users have been a primus motor for these changes – helping to transform old techniques into a knowledge-based approach to IT – and we are celebrating this new chapter with the announcement of CFEngines Nova and Constellation.
If you have been anywhere near a Unix system in the past ten years, you will almost certainly have heard of CFEngine and its ‘revolutionary, self-healing approach’ to datacentre automation. However, what you might not know is that its current third incarnation CFEngine 3 is both younger and more advanced than most of its imitators, harnessing the very latest ideas about system management – and the difference is all about knowledge.
Today CFEngine releases the latest version of its commercial enterprise software for configuration management and IT operations.
In addition to all the usual power of scalable and convergent system configuration, CFEngine 3 Nova brings a higher level of information awareness to system administrators at very low cost.
Resource efficiency takes on a new importance as users increasingly work in the Cloud where every CPU cycle is billed. The CFEngine mantra of “Lightweight! Lightweight! Lightweight!” has pushed the new release even further in the direction of resource efficiency. Considerable improvements in network efficiency have also been achieved, allowing reporting of many thousands of hosts every 5 minutes to a single hub aggregator - far in advance of other solutions.
*“If only you’d attached my legs, I wouldn’t be in this ridiculous position.” - C3PO, Star Wars*
Like most successful post-war technologies, the IT innovations that flourish today are those that bring freedom (in the broadest sense) to individuals. From the Italian scooter, to the American refrigerator, or the latest ability to communicate through an almost endless variety of interfaces and models, it is the desire to be set free that drives the commerce of technology.
It is always a surprise to me how many people leave college with the feeling that they learned nothing useful during their time there – with the attitude that theoretical learning and historical context (what distinguishes a college education from a mere training course) bear no relevance to the “real world”. This, of course, is nonsense.
Worse, many students go to work for organizations where the workplace culture turns them into battery hens, with every trace of individuality exorcised. Or perhaps industry norms and standards define the way employees have to behave. Where did the appreciation of education go, and what does it really mean?
