One feature our customers have requested for the next version of CFEngine Nova (available before summer 2012) is having the ability to collect reported data through a REST API. It is already possible to get at reporting data through the Mission Portal web-interface, as well as the command-line client cf-report. However, as we want to provide our customers with greater flexibility, we are now introducing the addition of REST (HTTP) as another interface.
My CFEngine journey started in 2008, when I was still a student. I was working on my master’s degree in Mathematics, specialising in cryptography at the University of Tromsø. I had moved to Oslo to write my master’s thesis in cooperation with the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment. At the same time, I took a course in Business leadership at the University of Oslo. As part of this course, we got the opportunity to be interns at technology start-ups in Oslo.
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.
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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.
