Configuration management with CFEngine 3

Spreker: Martin Simons

Abstract

Brief overview of the history of Configuration Management and choices made today. DevOps needs automated CM as a commodity and their culture a key factor with regards to the choice of the tool to use. I will give an overview of the available tools on a conceptual level and dive into CFEngine on a technical level.

CFEngine is developing at a remarkable speed within version 3, so I initiated a global team in order to make sure that an up to date version of CFEngine is available for the popular Debian Linux distribution. Please find us on: https://github.com/Webhuis/Cfengine-debian

The debian-team are now moving towards (co)maintainership of the CFEngine3 Debian package.

Decisions made:

• We build for Debian Jessie
• Mechanism for continous delivery, following the heartbeat of the upstream project

The presentation covers the way we organized the project

• Github as a cornerstone
• Issue tracking
• Pull requests
• Building the package from the git repository
• Testing the package

Demonstration of the newly built package on live machines

• Bootstrapping a server
• Bootstraping a client
• Make a configuration step with the client

Biography