p>When Ubuntu LTS Server Edition made the radical decision to offer Long Term (five year) support for its server edition software, it sparked the potential to make a significant impact on data center mangagement. Upgrading servers is one of the most disruptive operations in a data center because it means down-time. Now you might never have to take down a machine during its entire lifetime.
Perhaps a pipe dream? But, with a little luck, not so far from the truth as you might think. Today, thanks to package management, the bulk of patching and upgrading of a system can be done while the machine is live. This means the prospect that one might actually avoid taking down a machine to reinstall it for the entire life of the physical server is actually within reach, assuming that no critical kernel patches are needed.
Cloud woes? CFEngine made its Orion Cloud Pack available last week, as a 1-2-3 quick-start for users of its CFEngine 3.0.x family of products. Continuing the astronomical theme of the company, the page sports the slogan “Get the cloud under Orion’s belt” – a reference to the M42 Nebula in which is located, where else, just under the famous three stars of Orion’s belt.
3-2-1 Launch! “The Cloud Pack is a jump-start kit for the cloud,” explains CEO Thomas Ryd. “The idea is to make it completely trivial to get started with managed services. CFEngine is unique in not only making installation easy, but also in bringing hands-free repair to the problem. It’s especially important to have self-healing technology when your computer might be half-way across the world.”
Psyching yourself up for an upgrade to CFEngine 3? You’ve probably convinced yourself that it is harder than it is. CFEngine allows you to decide between high and low level approaches. High level often means simplistic or inefficient, but low level can be overwhelming – there is a balance to be struck. In this article, we start from the bottom up and list some of the most basic low level idioms you’ll have used before in CFEngine 2, to show you how they can look in CFEngine 3. These are basic capabilities from which all high level approaches can be built, without the need for user-scripting. Then, using CFEngine 3’s “ACL paradigm” you will be able to scale these easily for most needs…
The Netherlands are well known for pushing the boundaries of IT to support scientific initiatives. The Dutch Supercomputing Centre SARA (Stichting Academisch Rekencentrum) is one of the top 500 supercomputing sites in the world and has been an ardent CFEngine user for many years. In keeping with this cutting edge profile, SARA has been turning to the latest developments in CFEngine to offer cloud services to Dutch researchers.
More players are beginning the realize the benefits of the kind of model-driven configuration thinking that CFEngine introduced in the 1990s. Today, this kind of pre-programmed, policy-based configuration and repair are becoming essential partners for the commoditization of computing services in the Cloud. CFEngine has been there since before the beginning, and it still doesn’t care where your computer is located.
CFEngine introduced the idea of what is now called `model driven' configuration in the early 1990s. Although the name changes (e.g. policy driven, declarative, etc) the idea is still very simple: instead of describing procedural changes, you describe the desired state or outcome for your system.
It has become common recently to refer to CFEngine on the web as an “academic” project. Turns out, though, that this phrase turns out to mean quite different things depending on who’s using it, and sometimes it doesn’t really mean anything at all.
For CFEngine users, the academic connotation is generally perceived as a good one, representing CFEngine’s long standing commitment to both research and the educational environment. CFEngine is proudly academic in the sense that it was rationally and systematically designed and developed, with the specific choices based not on personal preferences or aesthetics but on well grounded, peer-reviewed and tested software engineering principles, things too often neglected in commercial software development.
The Joint Australian Tsunami Warning Centre’s Earthquake Monitoring component at Geoscience Australia recently adopted CFEngine’s newest worldwide software release to radically simplify the management of their test and production real-time monitoring systems.
With so many earthquake events along the Indo-Australian plate, and the risk of equally catastrophic Tsunami waves, Tsunami warnings are a mission critical service in the area. The recent 7.4 magnitude earthquake in Aceh, Indonesia sparked fears of Tsunami along the recently hard-hit areas around the Indian ocean, though major Tsunami usually result from much larger events.
The US Defense Department’s principal operational processing center for automated numerical meteorological and oceanographic analyses and predictions FNMOC chooses CFEngine Nova as the solution for their Meteorology and Oceanography Center, ensuring reliable weather reports for the US fleet.
In September 2010, the Naval Inventory Control Point (NICP) purchased CFEngine Nova for The Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center(FNMOC) in Monterey, California. CFEngine is the world technology leader in data center automation. Its software is used on millions of machines worldwide and is known to be versatile, lightweight and faster than lightning.
Jarle Bjorgeengen of the University of Oslo did a laboratory study showing the efficiency merits of CFEngine. The report is available to USENIX members in their ;login: magazine. Resource efficiency is a huge factor when talking about virtualization and configuration management in elastic Cloud Computing.
Mark Burgess was interviewed (with a sore throat) on FLOSS weekly.
Listen in here (mp3 file).
