Advanced Configuration Management with CFEngine 3.6 and the Design Center

LISA: Where systems engineering and operations professionals share real-world knowledge about designing, building, and maintaining the critical systems of our interconnected world.

The LISA conference has long served as the annual vendor-neutral meeting place for the wider system administration community. The LISA14 program recognized the overlap and differences between traditional and modern IT operations and engineering, and developed a highly-curated program around 5 key topics: Systems Engineering, Security, Culture, DevOps, and Monitoring/Metrics. The program included 22 half- and full-day training sessions; 10 workshops; and a conference program consisting of 50 invited talks, panels, refereed paper presentations, and mini-tutorials.

Mini Tutorial
Wednesday, November 12, 2014 - 4:00pm-5:30pm

Ted Zlatanov, CFEngine

Ted Zlatanov, CFEngine

Ted Zlatanov has been working with CFEngine as a programmer and sysadmin since 1999 and holds an MS degree from Boston University.

BibTeX
@conference {209055,
author = {Ted Zlatanov},
title = {Advanced Configuration Management with {CFEngine} 3.6 and the Design Center},
year = {2014},
address = {Seattle, WA},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = nov
}
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Description: 

The CFEngine Design Center allows system administrators to use, write and share CFEngine policy code in the form of Sketches that can do everything from basic system configuration to complex cloud resource management. Any existing CFEngine policy code can be easily “sketchified”, which makes it manageable through the Design Center tools, usable both in the open source and Enterprise versions of CFEngine.

We will explain how to use the Design Center to configure and deploy sketches, and also how to write your own sketches and contribute them to the community. Whether you are a CFEngine novice or a seasoned user, this talk will enable you to write meaningful sketches quickly. We will start with simple examples and then very quickly build easy-to-deploy sketches that abstract complex infrastructure automation logic.

Who should attend: 

CFEngine users (both novices and experienced users are welcome) who want to improve their ability to use CFEngine by using and extending the CFEngine Design Center.

Take back to work: 

Knowledge about the CFEngine Design Center, how to use it and how to create your own sketches and contribute them to the community.

Topics include: 
  • Introduction to the CFEngine Design Center
  • Using the Design Center in CFEngine Community and Enterprise
  • Deploying sketches
  • Structure of a sketch
  • Writing your first sketch
  • Using sketchify to convert your existing policy into sketches
  • The future