cfengine

Terraform modules release

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I am publishing four Terraform modules today. This code has lived into a private repository of mine for two years and I decided that it was time to dig it out, put it in dedicated, public repositories and release it. Two of them were my first experiments in making Terraform modules and probably too simple for general use. The other two are related to CFEngine: one helps making CFEngine test clients, the other making CFEngine servers.

As always, this code is released with a GPL license in the hope that it will be useful to more people than just myself.

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An update to cf-keycrypt

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I have published a small update to cf-keycrypt, so that it’s now easier to compile the tool on Debian systems and it’s compatible with CFEngine 3.15. You can find it here.

For those who don’t know the tool, I’ll try to explain what it is in a few words. The communication between CFEngine agents on clients and the CFEngine server process on a policy hub is encrypted. The key pairs used to encrypt/decrypt the communication are created on each node, usually at installation time or manually with a specific command. cf-keycrypt is a tool that takes advantage of those keys to encrypt and decrypt files, so that they are readable only on the nodes that are supposed to use them. The fact that the keys are created on the nodes themselves eliminates the need to distribute the keys securely.

cf-keycrypt was created years ago by Jon Henrik Bjørnstad, one of the founders of CFEngine (the company). The code has finally landed the CFEngine core sources as cf-secret, but it’s not part of the current stable releases. I had an hard time trying to compile it, but I made it with good help from the CFEngine help mailing list. I decided to give the help back to the community, publishing my updates and opening a pull request to the original code.  Until it’s merged, if it ever will, you can find my fork on my github.

cf-deploy v4 released

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After five years after the release of cf-deploy v3, I have just released cf-deploy v4. This version of cf-deploy fixes a number of shortcomings that made their way up to this point and that I wasn’t able to see until recently. It is now more flexible and easier to configure than it ever was. In particular, the documentation is way more comprehensive, covering installation, configuration and usage. The documentation also covers some of the internals, that will allow the hardcore user to fine tune the tool to better suit their needs.

You will find cf-deploy on github, as always. Enjoy!

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Down the rabbit hole: installing software

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Preface

This article is about using configuration management to install software on your own computers (e.g. your laptops, or the computers used by your family and relatives) and how the complexity of this task is easy to overlook, no matter if you are a newbie or an expert.

If you already know about configuration management and how it makes sense to use it at a small scale like, again, your own computers or your family’s, you can just skip at the section “New job, new setup”.

If you already know about configuration management and you are asking yourself why it should make sense to use it at a small scale, I suggest that you start a section earlier, at Personal configuration management”.

If you are new to configuration management, or you wonder what could be difficult in installing software on a set of systems, I suggest that you read the whole article.

In any case, happy reading!

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Building a simple, resilient, cheap network service with AWS

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In this post I’ll describe how I put together a number of pieces of information about AWS features to experiment with an idea. It’s nothing advanced, rather: it’s what happens when you are studying on something and you start seeing the possibilities. Don’t expect rocket science then, it’s more like a handful of notes I made in the hope they may be useful to more people than just myself.

Being an experiment where I was supposed to learn how to do things, it’s a manual set-up. Automation will follow, and in my case , it will be Terraform, but not in this post.

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Promise-based team leadership

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Can Promise Theory help you shape a better, effective leadership style?

Promise-based leadership will be the topic of the talk I will hold at two conferences. The first one is the Config Management Camp in Gent, Belgium, and it’s pretty close: February 5th. The second conference is the glorious Incontro DevOps Italia 2018, the Italian DevOps Meeting in Bologna, on March 9th.

When I joined Telenor Digital as the Head of IT I had to find an unconventional leadership style, as circumstances didn’t allow for a traditional one based on the “line-of-command” approach. After so many years spent with using CFEngine it was quite natural to me to use Promise Theory to model my new “reality” and understand how I could exploit exactly those peculiarities that were making the traditional leadership approach pointless.

Promise-based leadership has clear limits in applicability. It requires the right attitude in leaders and the right culture in the company. Where the right leaders and the right culture are present, I am confident that it provides significant advantages compared to the conventional approach based on top-down imposition.

I have been doing promise-based leadership for a bit more than one year now, regardless of people being direct reports or simply colleagues at any level of the hierarchy. My talk is a report of the experience so far. I don’t have definitive answers yet and there are several unanswered questions. I will be a bit tight with my talk schedule and I won’t be able to take many questions, but I hope to have several interesting conversations “on the side” of the conference events 🙂

One fun fact for closing: when I submitted to Config Management Camp I wasn’t really confident that my talk would be accepted because, I thought, the topic was kind-of “tangent” to the conference’s, so I didn’t even plan to attend. Later on the keynotes were announced, and one of them will be held by Mark Burgess, the inventor of Promise Theory. A few weeks more and I was informed that my talk was accepted and they actually liked it. So I will be talking of promise-based leadership at the same conference, in the same track and in the same room as the inventor of Promise Theory himself. Guess how hard I am working to put together a decent talk in time… 😀

cf-deploy v2 released

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Update: this article refers to the third version of cf-deploy. For the latest release, check the github repository.

Errata corrige: it’s actually v3! This is what happens when you don’t publish updates for your software for too long…

github-logo I took some time this weekend to release an update for cf-deploy. You have now the option to override the configuration hardcoded in the script by means of environment variables. Check the README for the details.

If you don’t know what cf-deploy is, that’s fair 😉 In two words, it’s a Makefile and a Perl front-end to it that makes it easier to pack together a set of files for a configuration management tools and send them to a distribution server. Designed with git and CFEngine in mind, it’s general enough that you can easily adapt it to any version control system and any configuration management tool by simply modifying the Makefile. If it sounds interesting, you are welcome to read Git repository and deployment procedures for CFEngine policies on this same blog. Enjoy!

 

cfengine-tap now on GitHub

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github-logo Back from the holiday season, I have finally found the time to publish a small library on GitHub. It’s called cfengine-tap and can help you writing TAP-compatible tests for your CFEngine policies.

TAP is the test anything protocol. It is a simple text format that test scripts can use to print out the results and test suites can consume. Originally born in the Perl world, it is now supported in many other languages.

Using this library it’s easier to write test suites for your CFEngine policies. Since it’s publicly available on GitHub and published under a GPL license, you are free to use it and welcome to contribute and make it better (please do).

Enjoy!

How I configure a docker host with CFEngine

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DockerAfter some lengthy busy times I’ve been able to restart my work on Docker. Last time I played with some containers to create a Consul cluster using three containers running on the same docker host — something you will never want to do in production.

And the reason why I was playing with a Consul cluster on docker was that you need a key/value store to play with overlay networks in Docker, and Consul is one of the supported stores. Besides, Consul is another technology I wanted to play with since the first minute I’ve known it.

To run an overlay network you need more than one Docker host otherwise it’s pretty pointless. That suggested me that it was time to automate the installation of a Docker host, so that I could put together a test lab quickly and also maintain it. And, as always, CFEngine was my friend. The following policy will not work out of the box for you since it uses a number of libraries of mine, but I’m sure you’ll get the idea.

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An init system in a Docker container

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DockerHere’s another quick post about docker, sorry again if it will come out a bit raw.

In my previous post I talked about my first experiments with docker. There was a number of unanswered questions at first, which got an answer through updates to the blog post during the following days. All but one. When talking about a containerized process that needs to log through syslog to an external server, the post concluded:

if the dockerized process itself needs to communicate with a syslog service “on board”, this may not be enough…

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