On Tue, 29 Nov 2016 22:33:51 -0800 (PST) [email protected] wrote: ji> In conversations at convention, such as RedHat Summit 2016, CFEngine is ji> treated like a dirty word.
It's good to note here that RedHat owns Ansible since summer 2016. But generally I agree. ji> CFEngine is often ji> associated with complexity to use and get up to speed (lead time) vs ji> the competition of other solutions; Puppet DSL or HashCorp or YAML ji> (Salt, Ansible, Hiera) are far easier to master. CFEngine DSL is not ji> all that intuitive, especially to a new comer. This is one of the reasons a common CM language would be valuable. There is no way to write a popular CM tool currently without also inventing a new vendor ecosystem, since there is no sharing of techniques between the vendors. Maybe I want to use CFEngine with a Puppet module? "No, that's just not how it's done." ji> As an analogy, I feel like CF Engine is the dream car, but assembly is ji> required, but some parts, like transmission you may have to build it ji> yourself. Once assembled, there's two stick shifts. This is instead of ji> fully assembled with automatic shifting. To continue the car analogy, currently driving every CM car requires retraining drivers, special wheels, and separate lanes for every vendor. That's clearly a ridiculous situation, but it's typical of young industries such as ours. Currently it's really hard to write a single CM management policy to do everything you need, except for trivial cases. So people end up with 40% tool X and 50% tool Y and 10% done by hand or in golden images. This has technical costs such as rewriting policy, supporting multiple modules, and testing multiple tools on multiple platforms. But the technical costs are a small part of the overall costs. This knowledge fragmentation results in misunderstandings, complexity, conflicts, political battles in the organizations, and security problems. These costs are partly why customers are moving away from CM tools in general. Ted -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "dev-cfengine" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/dev-cfengine/87vav5ngj6.fsf%40lifelogs.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
