Automation has been central to infrastructure management and more recently to the continuous delivery of applications, DevOps. What has changed is the scale at which these are conducted. CFEngine delivers IT automation at Web-Scale. Scale in this context includes speed and agility along with size. So, smaller organizations can also benefit from IT automation for their infrastructure and continuous delivery needs. In this webinar we discussed the business value of Web-Scale IT Automation as well as CFEngine's capabilities through a demonstration of its key features. Based on sound principles of Promise Theory CFEngine is a highly scalable, very secure, model-based approach to infrastructure management and continuous delivery.

1. IT Automation
with CFEngine
Business Value and Basic Concepts

2. The Dematerialization of the datacenter
Connected Devices
Mobile
Cloud
Internet/Intranet
Client Server
Mainframe

3. ‘IT’ is About Continuous Delivery of Applications
Continuous Delivery
Develop
Test
Stage
Monitoring and Feedback Loop
Improved
Productivity
Error
Reduction
Visibility
Deploy

4. Application Delivery – Lots of Players and Moving Parts
Input
People, Process
Source Code
Web/D
BA
Admin
Release
Team
Relase
Eng
App
Admin
Build Automation
Repository –
war, jar, rb,
ear, dll, aspx,
N-Tier Application
Load Balancer
IT Ops
web
Configuration Parameters
app
db
web
app
db
web
Infrastructure Automation
Continuous Delivery &
Continuous Operations
db
web
CFEngine
app
app
db
Middleware
Release Automation Flow
Dev
Infrastructure
Automation
Requirements
Test
Stage
Prod

5. A Different Approach to Automation is Called For
Continuous delivery
requires continuous automation
... not power-assisted intervention

6. Architected for speed, security and Web Scale
1. Define Desired State
2. Ensure
Defined State
Design Center
PolicyServer
CFDB
3. Verify Actual State
CFE Agents
Knowledge Center

7. CFEngine – IT Automation at Web-Scale
History
Technology Validation
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1993: Open Source project
2001: CFEngine version 2
2004: Promise Theory
2009: CFEngine version 3
2014: CFEngine version 3.6
Infrastructure Automation, Continuous Delivery
Distributed, Lean, Secure architecture
IT Automation at Web-Scale (size, agility)
Community (Open source), Enterprise edition
Market Validation
Customer Validation
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>10 million servers
10,000 companies
100 countries
Tens of thousands of servers (individual
customer deployments)

8. JPMorgan Chase 2013
Hall of Innovation Winner
CFEngine’s innovative technology has enabled JPMC
to achieve global consistency of their dynamic
JPMC Award 1.JPG
configuration environment, resulting in cost savings,
risk mitigation, efficiency and product differentiation and
faster time to market.
As the most strategic and scalable automation platform,
CFEngine has made standardization easier to achieve,
allowing systems to manage themselves and
converge to their desired state
Mike Ashworth,
Chief Information Officer for J.P.Morgan Chase

9. Examples of CFEngine implementations
Delivering a PaaS
Solution
• Provide completed automation from bare metal to the application layer
• Delivering email-as-a-service, backup-as-a-service and managed
services to more than 200k end customers
• Expanding to application-release-as-a-service
Application
Release
• 400 applications in production, each associated with CFEngine policy
• Each application group handles its own application logic and
dependencies (processes, config files, ..)
• Integrates with homegrown “click and deploy” solution
Creating an IaaS
Platform
• Highly automated with every change in CFEngine and version control
• Achieve high SLA by implementing SW load balancing with CFE
• > 1,000 servers per admin
Server Automation
at Scale
• Tens of thousands of production servers running CFEngine ensuring
desired state for heterogeneous environments
• 500:1 server to admin ratio in tier 2,
and 10,000:1 in tier 3

10. Supported Platforms

11. Infrastructure Automation at Web-scale
CFEngine offers a programmatic
approach to configuring infrastructure,
which is different from most commercial
configuration products. It offers a highly
scalable approach, with a pull-based,
distributed architecture.
Laurie F. Wurster,
Ronni J. Colville,
Gartner Research
Market Trends:
ARA, DevOps and Mobile Device Management
Ignite Configuration Management, 11/27/2013

12. Defining Next Generation Lean IT Operations
“With CFEngine, I can define a new Software Defined Datacenter
and offer IaaS and PaaS to my customers within 10 minutes”
Mike Svoboda
Lead Automation Engineer, LinkedIn

13. How LinkedIn Uses CFEngine
Functions we have automated:
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Hardware failure detection
Account administration
Privilege escalation
Software deployment
O/S configuration management
Process / service management
Software deployment
System monitoring
“You never need to log into a machine to manage it”

14. Summary – CFEngine at LinkedIn
Metric
Before implementation of
CFEngine at LinkedIn
After implementation of
CFEngine at LinkedIn
Headcount
6 people supporting a
few hundred machines
6 people supporting tens of
thousands of machines
Time spent
Hours to build a single machine
Build complete datacenters in
minutes
Productivity
Hours spent collecting
data before change,
change itself causing outages
Can focus on building infrastructure,
team became proactive to fix future
problems, not reactive / firefighting
Ease of scaling
server deployment
Incredibly difficult
to respond to change,
low visibility into
production
Superior administration, rapid
response to changing needs,
complete system visibility

15. Demonstration
Creating an IaaS Platform to enable self-service
for application development teams
Create multi-tier infrastructure with VMware vCloud
• Load balancer
• Web servers
• Cache servers
• Deploy a multi-tier application to the infrastructure

16. Demonstration
File Integrity Monitoring and Reporting
File Integrity Monitoring of Unix User Account Files
• Create dynamic groups of servers based on the environment
• Define files to monitor
• Generate compliance reports on changes
• Filter, export and schedule reports

17. Summary
CFEngine Enterprise delivers
IT Automation at Web-Scale
Infrastructure Automation, Continuous Delivery and Continuous
Operations using a model based approach that is secure,
scalable, and agile and provides enterprise-wide visibility,
while ensuring service levels and compliance.

18. Next Steps
• Download and Try CFEngine Enterprise Today
http://cfengine.com/evaluate-enterprise
• Attend the follow-on Webinar – Getting Started with CFEngine
Tuesday, Feb-18, 10am PST
• Join the conversation on our community help forum
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups&hl=en#!forum/help-cfengine