Slides from 'Introduction to CFEngine 3.6.0' webinars held July 1 and 2, 2014. Topics covered in this webinar included an overview of IT Automation at WebScale and new features of CFEngine Enterprise 3.6.0 including: • Proactive alerts on policy drifts through a simple-to-use, configurable dashboard • Comprehensive visibility into IT infrastructure with enhanced compliance and extensible inventory reporting • New language abstractions to improve administration productivity • Painless integration with other IT systems using native JSON support

1. www.cfengine.com
IT Automation at WebScale
with CFEngine 3.6.0
Andrew Yeung
Director, Product Management
July 1, 2014

2. Agenda
• IT Automation at WebScale
• What’s New in Version 3.6.0
• Demo
• Q&A

3. IT Automation at WebScale
Intelligent Infrastructure
Automation
Agile, secure and scalable
Policy-driven and convergent
Simple, self-service
consumption
Policy-based Application
Deployment
Repeatable and error-free
Manage local or cloud-based
infrastructure
Deliver on platform
standardization
Continuous Operations and
Self-healing
Complete visibility and
alerting
Compliance with self-healing
OOTB inventory and
reporting
Simplify the delivery and management of the on-going operations of the software stack
anywhere and across any device in a timely and predictive fashion
Scale Speed Security Stability

4. CFEngine’s Heritage
10,000+ Customers across 100+ countries
10 million+ servers managed
200,000 nodes managed at a single customer
Market-leading scalability, securability, & reliability

5. Distributed, Lightweight Architecture
1. Define Desired State
2. Ensure
Desired State
HUB
3. Verify Actual State
CFEngine
Hub
Design Center
Mission
Portal
CFE Agents
Policy Language

6. Diverse Set of Use Cases
Deliver Managed Services
and PaaS
Streamline Application
Release
Create and Support an IaaS
platform
Server Automation at
Scale
Maintain consistency and
standardization to
achieve high SLA
Capitalize on speed to
deliver value faster to
end users
Meet increased business
expectations of IT while
driving down costs
TO
…and many more

7. Our Customers’ Wish List
“Automation is
fantastic, but we
need comprehensive
visibility and control
of our sprawling
heterogeneous
environment”
“We need a simplified
user experience that
would provide
immediate value with
out-of-the-box
capabilities like alerts
and reporting.”
“Scale and speed are
increasingly important
in order to support my
growing cloud and on-
premise infrastructure
footprint.”

9. Give Administrators Actionable Insight
Do I have the latest
software packages
installed?
Am I adhering to our
compliance policies?
Do I have the latest
patches installed?

10. Visualize Your Environment, Stay
Informed
• Simple-to-use, configurable dashboard
• Alert on events that require attention
• Tracking and recorded system events
• Drill down to diagnose and take action accordingly
Instant visibility, comprehensive coverage, exact data

11. Manage Custom Compliance Policies
• Rules based on inventory data,
available patches, software
packages and CFEngine policies
• Assign priorities for each rule
• Send alerts based on policy
breaches
Be proactively alerted on policy drift to ensure system consistency and
resiliency to support mission critical environments.

12. Filter on self discovered objects and
external data sources
Cross
Environment
Cross
Applications
Cross Clouds
Entire SW
Stack
Extensible Inventory Reports
Combine CFEngine’s flexible policy language with an intuitive UI

13. Do More With Less
Better language abstractions, new functions = more efficiency and less coding
90% reduction
in coding!

14. Native JSON Support
• Interoperability
between disparate
management
systems
• Supports read and
write of JSON
objects
Facilitate automated end-to-end system integration use cases through simple
data interchange
3rd-party systems
e.g.

15. Mustache*-based File Templating
• Simply specify
template_method
as “mustache”
• Pass data container
to the
template_data
attribute
* Mustache - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mustache_(template_system)
Simplify configuration file management using common logic-less templating
format

16. Managed OSes
Enterprise APIs
CFEngine Hub
Mission
Portal
3.6.0 WebScale Enhancements
• New PostgreSQL Backend
supports thousands of managed
OSes per hub
• Multi-Hub architecture
• Vastly improved collection speed
based on delta collection
• Drastic performance
improvement of both Mission
Portal UI and APIs
Managed OSes Managed OSes
Dev Test Prod
Prior to 3.6.0: Lean, Distributed,
Autonomous, C based minimal
dependencies
WebScale Architecture
Redis key-value
PostgreSQL
Hub

17. What Users Are Saying about 3.6.0
“Congrats to the CFEngine development team.
This has been the most epic and stress tested
release to date. Its certainly production ready. We
will be upgrading production to 3.6 in the next
several weeks. Thank you for the hard work and
dedication! You guys made sure that 3.6 was rock
solid. It’s without a doubt the best stable major
release yet. =)
Cheers! Keep shipping!
Mike”
Mike Svoboda, Senior Systems and Automation
Engineer, LinkedIn

18. www.cfengine.com
DEMO

19. Take It For A Spin!
Download CFEngine Enterprise free for up to 25 nodes!
http://cfengine.com/product/free-download/
Check out our video tutorials
@ http://cfengine.com/learn
Or try our prepackaged
CFEngine environment
using Vagrant
Download and unzip the Vagrant project
$ cd <location of vagrant_env>
$ vagrant up
…and you are all set!!
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20. Summary
Significant dashboard, visualization and reporting
enhancements
Robust change, compliance and inventory capabilities
Enhanced abstractions and integrations
Numerous architectural enhancements
CFEngine 3.6.0 is the preferred cross-environment, cross-cloud,
cross-OS automation solution

21. www.cfengine.com