[HN Gopher] CFEngine's Star Trek and AI Origins (2023)
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CFEngine's Star Trek and AI Origins (2023)
Author : refset
Score : 33 points
Date : 2024-03-25 15:25 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mark-burgess-oslo-mb.medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (mark-burgess-oslo-mb.medium.com)
| kqr wrote:
| I tried CFEngine3 for some personal configuration management
| needs a few years ago, and I was impressed by how well thought
| out and designed it seemed compared to the more popular
| alternatives.
|
| Ultimately I ported over to Ansible because that's what I need to
| maintain fluency in for professional reasons, but I really lament
| it. It's a slog through mud compared to the clarity that is
| CFEngine.
| somat wrote:
| When I was looking for a configuration management system, I too
| was impressed by cfengines theoretical underpinnings. however I
| also went with ansible. mainly because the cfengine story was
| "commit your entire configuration world immediately to
| cfengine" and ansible's was "you don't need to commit to
| anything, we will ease you into it. first, here is how you run
| a command remotely...." Not needing an agent really won me
| over.
| betaby wrote:
| First time I heard about CFEngine in ~2004. Version of that time
| didn't impress me. However CFEngine3 is a totally different
| story. I have been using it since 2012 and have not plans to
| switch. Even though CFEngine is not the most popular one it's one
| of the subjectively 'best'. Agent-less or kind-of-agent-less
| options like Ansible are not good enough feature-wise. Chef and
| Puppet are less convenient to me because of dependency on ruby.
| NewJazz wrote:
| Have you used Salt? I've heard very good things about it, and
| it is an agent-based tool.
|
| I'm curious how it compares.
| chronid wrote:
| Salt is unfortunately (in my two year old experience) full of
| features and strange bugs related to them - I do remember
| encountering a bunch of memory leaks master side for example.
| Deployment had the classic issues of python applications.
|
| The core was (mostly) solid, but if you need anything done on
| it do buy the time of some consultant working on it already.
|
| It's not as accessible as ansible, but definitely more
| accessible than cfengine. At least coming from Ansible.
| mathverse wrote:
| CFEngine is great if you need to manage a large heterogenous
| fleet of different UNIX flavors like HP-UX,AIX,Solaris,Linux.
|
| Have used it at AT&T and it's been great.
| zvr wrote:
| While of course large networks of heterogeneous nodes is where
| CFEngine really shines, do not dismiss its use in smaller
| scale.
|
| Especially since the Enterprise edition is free for up to 25
| nodes.
|
| One can use CFEngine for managing a dozen of Linux boxes very
| efficiently!
| throw0101c wrote:
| I first learned about configuration management and
| 'infrastructure as code' from:
|
| * http://infrastructures.org
|
| They had "Bootstrapping an Infrastructure" in (twelfth) LISA
| (1998):
|
| * http://www.infrastructures.org/papers/bootstrap/bootstrap.ht...
|
| * https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa-98/bootstrapping-infr...
|
| They started the concept in 1990s using make(1) files as their
| state engine because there was nothing else available ("Step
| 11").
| bch wrote:
| > They started the concept in 1990s using make(1) files as
| their state engine
|
| That doesn't sound unreasonable, even now...
| mprovost wrote:
| The original distributed configuration system from the 1980s,
| Sun's NIS (aka yp) was also driven by makefiles.
| refset wrote:
| I stumbled on this after realising that Mark Burgess, who created
| CFEngine, is also the author of this other recent HN post on
| "Using Promise Theory to solve the distributed consensus problem"
| [0] (from the same blog).
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39676493
| unixhero wrote:
| But what is CfEngine???
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