Ten Reasons for 5-minute configuration update and repair

by Mark Burgess - March 19, 2012

How often should your configuration management system verify the integrity of your system? The default choices we've made by CFEngine are the results of almost 20 years of research into this area. Below you will find ten issues and references that explain why these choices are underpinned by the science. These ten things really all amount to the same thing: if you are playing ping-pong against the adversary of change, you need to be as quick on your feet as your opponent -- and faster.

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What makes clouds float and developers operative? Agility!

by Mark Burgess - January 06, 2012

In IT, the challenge of the environment is the jungle of changing demand, business imperatives, and the striving for competitive fitness in a cut-throat marketplace; it is network requests to servers, spanning a landscape of different operating systems and their curiosities; it is a backlog of security patches and bug-fixes that need to be navigated, without losing balance. Superficially, this is quite different from the primate jungle, but mastering this other world is still about having sufficient speed and dexterity.

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CFEngine @ USENIX LISA 2011

by the editor - December 13, 2011

The LISA conference, run by the USENIX organization [www.usenix.org], is the largest conference specifically for system administration today. It has been 25 years in the running, and has been a cultural and professional centre 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.

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A Preview of 'Project Constellation': The Network of Stars

by the editor - December 06, 2011

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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CFEngine, SysAdmin 3.0 and the Third Wave of IT Engineering

by Mark Burgess - November 22, 2011

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.

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