***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?
CFEngine no longer supports the conversion tool for upgrades from CFEngine version 2 to 3. Manual intervention was still needed after its usage, and a simple, direct translation can be a poor choice that misses the opportunity for improvement. We recommend following the Upgrading from CFEngine 2 to 3 guide, alternatively in combination with Professional Services from CFEngine to provide a ‘best effort’ conversion.
CFEngines 1 & 2 CFE3 Community Core CFE Nova World-wide deployment Consistent extensible syntax Introducing Knowledge Management Technology leader Enhanced configuration modelling Scalable reporting Brought convergent repair Lists, patterns, methods Native windows support User extensible without scripts SQL, LDAP integration Fault tolerance features CFDB searchable knowledge bank Generalized package model Spreadsheet model for content driven policies Simplified installation and upgrade Packaging Product integration Support
As the summer draws to a close, CFEngine’s core development team has been wrapping up some intense development to bring you version 3.2.0 of the CFE Community Edition. This release includes some major improvements to community users, and forms the foundation for our upcoming commercial release. See the blog post https://www.blogcompiler.com/2011/08/29/cfengine-3-2-0-extended-change-log/ for a technical summary.
We believe that CFEngine 3.2.0 is now the easiest and most scalable configuration management system to get running in multiplatform environments (Linux, Solaris, AIX, HPUX). Starting with the new bundled policy, just a single command on each host will bootstrap hosts together in a simple classical centrally managed star network, whether in the cloud or on bare metal.
CFEngine is an inexpensive life-support system for complex and mission critical IT infrastructure…
Every year the world spends billions on risk avoidance – safety and backup equipment, security systems and even insurance policies against loss and liability. For many of us, the risk of serious loss is quite small (though still sufficient to keep insurance companies in business) but in some industries the consequences of loss are so serious that even a small risk is unacceptable.
CFEngine is the leading vendor of open source configuration management solutions, used by the IT industry to keep datacenters running. Its products are installed on millions of servers world wide. The company has been profitable since its inception in 2008.
“We expect to see fundamental changes in the IT Operations industry in the next few years”, said Bjørn Erik Reinseth, Partner of Ferd Capital. “CFEngine is the thought leader among the new generation of solution providers and we believe they will be a game changer and capture a significant share of this market.”
