Yesterday, we held a seminar in our offices titled IT infrastructure: Balancing best practices and everyday constraints. Mark Burgess, pioneer of software configuration management and founding CTO of CFEngine AS, was our guest star, and gave a very interesting talk about the Third Wave of IT Management.

We took the opportunity to introduce Normation, presenting our mission, our strategic partnership with CFEngine AS, and the aims of Rudder. For those who weren’t there, we thought we’d share an extract of this presentation:

It was a great event, with many interesting questions and discussions, and we’d like to thank everyone who attended, and of course Mark for coming all the way to Paris for this, and his warm comments about Normation.

If you’re curious about Normation or Rudder, we’d love to hear from you – contact us by email, Twitter (@Normation and @RudderProject) or IRC (#rudder on FreeNode)!

Cette semaine, de mercredi à mercredi (du 22 au 29 février donc), Normation va faire son premier Barcamp Rudder !

Mais qu’est-ce qu’un barcamp ? D’après Wikipedia :

Un BarCamp est une rencontre, une non-conférence ouverte qui prend la forme d’ateliers-événements participatifs où le contenu est fourni par les participants qui doivent tous, à un titre ou à un autre, apporter quelque chose au Barcamp. C’est le principe pas de spectateur, tous participants.

(Source et plus d’infos : http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/BarCamp)

L’objectif de cette semaine c’est d’améliorer Rudder, de faire qu’il nous plaît à tous, avant la sortie de la version 2.4.0 début mars, et travailler sur les sujets qu’on néglige parfois : communication, communauté, documentation, tests, qualité, ergonomie…

On profite de l’occasion pour faire une opération portes ouvertes : vous êtes les bienvenus chez nous tous les jours de 9h jusqu’à tard… Passez-nous faire un petit coucou, tester la dernière version de Rudder, nous donner votre avis, grignoter un morceau… Promis, on ne vous demandera pas vraiment de travailler

L’équipe de Normation au grand complet (9 personnes) vous donne donc rendez-vous tous les jours au 87 rue de Turbigo, 75003 Paris ! C’est au métro Temple sur la ligne 3 ou République sur les lignes 5, 8, 9 ou 11.

En particulier, un évènement communautaire autour de Rudder / CFEngine aura lieu jeudi soir pour se rencontrer et discuter (ou troller) autour d’un verre (ou deux).

Ca nous ferait très plaisir de vous voir ici alors n’hésitez pas à passer ! Si vous ne pouvez pas venir, rejoignez-nous sur IRC (#rudder sur FreeNode) ou suivez-nous sur Twitter (@normation et @RudderProject).

We’ve been back from the latest FOSDEM in Brussels for a week now, but are only just recovering from the freezing-cold weather they had there…

As always, FOSDEM was a great event, with thousands of open source users, contributors and developers all mixing together and sharing their findings, software and thoughts. A real spirit of collaboration and possibility always reigns at FOSDEM, and this year was no exception.

For our part, we introduced Rudder, our open source configuration management tool in the Configuration Management devroom on the Sunday (see the official talk page). Our talk was well received, with many interesting questions. Thanks to those who were there, and those who made it possible!

Our slides are available on SlideShare, or you can just view them here:

We also did our share of collaborating, and plan-making. Developers from three of the main components of Rudder, CFEngine, FusionInventory and OpenLDAP, were at FOSDEM, and we got together to discuss each project, their integration into Rudder and ways to improve both our use of them and the community’s experience of them.

Some promising ideas were thrown around, hopefully you’ll hear more about them here soon!

Just like every year, once the holiday season is over, we start looking forward to FOSDEM the first weekend in February!

This year, four of us from Normation will be attending, all the way through, from the world-famous, record-breaking beer event to the last talks on the Sunday.

We’ll be introducing Rudder, our open source configuration management tool in the Configuration Management devroom on the Sunday. Our talk will show how Rudder’s approach enables everyone in the IT department to benefit from the advantages of configuration management, without necessarily needing to learn a complex tool, or even get their hands dirty. We’ll describe and demonstrate how this is possible, and dive into the technical architecture that makes it work. Read more on the official talk page.

We’re always interested in meeting new people and discussing configuration management, tools like CFEngine, open source… or even LDAP and Scala, for the more adventurous

Come and have a chat, we’ll be easily recognisable in our flashy black t-shirts with the Rudder logo!

Just before FOSDEM, we’re giving a CFEngine 3 training session. Some seats are still available, so why not come and kill two birds with one stone – some professional training at the end of the week, and a good open source event at the weekend!

Looking forward to seeing you in Brussels!

The Open World Forum 2011 edition took place last week in Paris. I was invited to present a workshop in the Cloud Computing track.

This gave me the opportunity to outline the importance of optimizing the “setup” phase of machines when using cloud computing.

Today’s tools and APIs make it very easy to create and destroy instances, but every time you do start a new instance, you’ve got to actually set it up to the state where it’s ready to do what you need (ie, be a web server, load balancer, database, whatever…).

This is an important phase to optimize: it’s the one where you’re paying for, but not yet able to use, the service

Three approaches seem to co-exist here:

1. Doing it manually: Obviously, this is one to avoid. Not only is it excessively time-consuming, but it’s also error-prone. (Ever tried doing the exact same complicated thing a dozen times over without making the odd mistake or going crazy?)
2. Pre-configuring in static images: This is a very common approach. You know how you want things, so you set them up once, and make an image of that state (ISO, AMI, whatever…). You can then use your image to create your new machine just the way you want it, no time wasted! That’s great, but wears out over time -it’s a very brittle approach. If you ever need to change that configuration, not only will it take a while (get the image, change it, upload it again, etc…), but you also have no way of propagating the change to existing instances based on the old image.
3. Using a configuration tool: That’s a deliberately vague title – I’m referring to any software approach to configuring your machine, be it a bunch of home grown scripts or a fully blown configuration management tool, such as CFEngine, Puppet or Chef.

If you’ve read any of the previous posts on this blog, you’ll know that we strongly favor the last approach

Configuration management tools have many benefits over the previous approaches: using a dedicated, purpose-built tool to set up your servers means that you can reach new levels of control and flexibility, that you cannot achieve with static, brittle pre-built images. Need to make a change? Just update your reference configuration rules, and the change will be applied to all your instances, old and new, over the next few minutes.

Enough teasing, the slides below tell the rest of the story. I introduced the main tools I mentioned before, and provided a quick overview of how CFEngine works. Those at the session also got a sneak preview of our own open source project, Rudder, to be publicly announced very soon…

I’d welcome any comments on how you setup your cloud instances… and be happy to discuss all these topics at another open source conference in the future!