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).
A new feature in the CFEngine Community Core is attracting some interest from system administrators. It is the simplest of ideas, but then such ideas are often the best.
Following CTO Mark Burgess’ recent blog with Carolyn Rowland on the Business Value of System Administration, this new feature emerges as a simple way to document the business value accorded to the system administration job.
The value_kept, value_repaired, value_notkept settings fall under cfengine transaction logging and allow administrators to attach actual monetary (or other) values to promises kept, or issues repaired, or conversely measure the loss of non-compliance in dollar terms (choose your currency). This value is summed and recorded for each execution of CFEngine, and can be turned into graphs for your management reports.
Moving into a new year, the privately owned and funded CFEngine company has changed its board to include some power members of the Free and Open Software community. “The time has come to change the style of our board work, as we move into a different phase of growth,” says CEO Thomas Ryd.
Joining the board is Open Source superstar Haavard Nord, former co-founder and CEO of Trolltech, the Norwegian company behind the Qt library, and the basis for KDE. Trolltech (which translates roughly into “technology magic”) was recently acquired by Nokia as a strategic part of their software development.
Regular training sessions are now available directly from CFEngine in Florida.
Visit our training page for more details and regular updates.
Following the development of the community standard library, CFEngine has now released a conversion utility that transforms existing CFEngine 2 policies into a basic CFEngine 3 format. The output can be run in either the Community Edition, CFEngine Nova or any other version of CFEngine going forward.
Earlier this year, CFEngine released an upgrade manual for community users. Now with the core transformation utility, commercial customers will be able to save potentially hundreds of hours of conversion time on a large installation of cfengine, moving to version 3.
