The puppet community has split

There was a split in the puppet community and a new project saw life as a result: Chef. Chef is describing itself as :

Chef is a systems integration framework, built to bring the benefits of configuration management to your entire infrastructure. With Chef, you can:

• Manage your servers by writing code, not by running commands. (via Cookbooks)
• Integrate tightly with your applications, databases, LDAP directories, and more. (via Libraries)
• Easily configure applications that require knowledge about your entire infrastructure (“What systems are running my application?” “What is the current master database server?”)

More details about the Chef differentiators can be found here.

In a future post, I’ll explore in more details the challenges around configuration automation, and the procedural approach.

Reductive Labs received funding

Reductive Labs, the company responsible for Puppet, has received  $2 Million in funding. Puppet has been gaining traction against cfengine, but it will be interesting to see how Reductive Labs uses its funding, and how the new Chef solution is impacting this progression.

Cloud Computing brought configuration automation in the spotlight

One of the cornerstones of Cloud Computing is the automation of the infrastructure configuration. Either because you want to build a highly automated infrastructure supporting cloud users, or you are putting your application in the cloud. In both cases, infrastructure and applications configuration has to be captured, maintained and automatically provisioned. This will enable rapid scale out, fail over, or in general deployment and redeployment of the managed components.

A highly scalable datacenter automation tool merging discover, update, provisioning, monitoring, and reporting technologies from Sun Connection and N1SM into one tool.

However, by looking at the Oracle World demo, it seems that the UI is radically different from the N1 System Manager (gone the embedded CLI ?).

Also, by looking at the supported platform, it seems that Windows platform is not supported anymore :

Sun N1 System Manager :

From a centralized management console, customers can provision Solaris, Linux, and Windows with a simple drag-and-drop, and monitors the health of systems in an efficient manner.

Sun Ops Center :

The comprehensive, highly scalable Linux and Solaris life cycle management tool.

The good news is that Sun Ops Center will be delivered as open source too :

Building on Sun’s commitment to open standards and customer choice, Sun will continue to innovate the Sun xVM platform and collaborate with open source communities. The first of Sun’s contributions will be the Common Agent Container (CAC) code to the OpenxVM.org community under GPLv3. The CAC is the heart of the management infrastructure for many of Sun’s products, including the Sun xVM Ops Center. In addition, Sun plans to make the entire code base used by Sun xVM Ops Center available to the OpenxVM.org community in the first quarter of 2008.

It’s not clear however if this means the end of life for the N1 System Manager, since right now, the Ops Center does not provide a complete replacement.

• Discovery and mapping of the complete IT environment, including its relationships to business processes and transactions
• Full-scale Configuration Automation capability across network devices, physical and virtual servers, and client systems
• Change Management to support configuration policy adherence and process automation
• Orchestration and automation of activities supporting IT processes, reducing errors and expenses in task execution across operational processes and toolsets
• Automation of Continuous Compliance, including audit and enforcement of standard configurations across heterogeneous IT environments

I’ve been working on the second item in the list for the past year, and now that more of this is announced, I’ll provide more information about what this does, and how runbook automation, coupled with configuration automation can solve many of the challenges that IT operators face today.

Emprisa Networks, Inc., the leading provider of smart network configuration, compliance and change management solutions, offers solutions for extending IT service management initiatives to the network infrastructure. Emprisa’s E-NetAware solution provides immediate return on investment in several key areas – improves service availability with less change errors; automates configuration management for improved operational efficiencies, enhances network security through policy-based configuration management and greatly improves service responsiveness. E-NetAware provides support for routers, switches, firewalls, load balancers, wireless access points and other network devices from over 25 vendors.

I’ll provide more details on this technology in a future blog.

RealOps AutoPilot products automate the business of operations allowing IT organizations to deliver higher levels of service at lower costs to business users. Built on the industry leading RealOps AMP (Automation Management Platform), AutoPilot solutions for Problem, Change and Service Management automate the repetitive, manual tasks IT staffs perform every day.

You will get more details on that blog soon.

The challenged Opsware patent claims methods for automatically configuring or installing software on a plurality of computing devices having different respective sets of software and/or configurations of operating parameters.

In November 2006, Opsware announced :

The patent — number 7,124,289 — covers the cornerstone of Opsware’s technology, the ability to automate the management of servers and network devices across a data center through model-based control. This innovation allows models of granular configuration information about servers or networks to be stored as records in a database and, as changes are made to any aspect of a systems configuration model, to push those changes to any relevant servers or network devices. This technique supports automation for even extremely large and global datacenters, and it provides a fast, efficient and cost-saving approach to ensuring consistency and compliance.

It’s not clear why this patent is challenged now. The patent was filed on October 31st 2000, but the argument made by pubpat is that various open source project existed before the filling date.

A Service Container is a container for a service, functionality or application which can act with a variable amount of Resources. The Service Container acts as the bridge between the Service and the Resource Provider, relaying Service needs to the Resource Provider and commands from the Resource Provider to the Service. The Service Container is responsible for tracking the state and the resource needs of the Service.

There is a one to one relationship between a Service Container and a Service. The Service Container handles the life-cycle management of the Service and provides an access point for communications from the Resource Provider.

This concept provides a nice way to abstract middleware applications which are providing some level of distributed resource management, like Grid Engine, but also other “new application”.

Well done Grid Engine team (you have to work on those code names though

With Scalent V/OE, infrastructure repurposing becomes nearly instantaneous. Changing system function and topology doesn’t require touching physical cables or machines. Instead of spending hours or days reloading software, changing configurations and even moving machines and cables, IT teams can rack once, cable once, then reconfigure repeatedly, in minutes, effortlessly. Failover is automatic, and data center functionality matches the data center schematic — what you see is what you get.

One issue with that approach is that datacenters are heavily silo’ed : the network is administered by a group different from the group managing the storage, or the servers. In the worst case scenario, these functions are even outsourced, either traditionally or leveraging technologies like Amazon S3. Is that something that Scalent is addressing ?

More and more, managing servers, and services, will become a business integration problem, using concepts usually reserved to e-commerce, implementing change management best practices, and leveraging business process automation tools.

HP today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to purchase Mercury Interactive Corp., a leading IT management software and services company, through a cash tender offer for $52.00 per share, or an enterprise value of approximately $4.5 billion, which is net of existing cash and debt.

This comes after the acquisition of Peregrine in September 2005.

HP portfolio in the Business Service Management, Enterprise consolidation and optimization is now very comprehensive.

• There should be an agreement to use a common glossary, like the version 3 of the ITIL Glossary.
• A common functional model for the OMC should be developed, and each product mapped to it, or classified in the taxonomy. I’m referring to a model like the one I developed, and published in this post. It might not be perfect, and could be definitely improved and adapted, but I found it to be a good base.
• The taxonomy should be created based on a data center management operational model, aligned with customers functional requirements.
• When this mapping is done, the consortium should drive a integration strategy to resolve overlaps and gaps, as well as defining a common integration and interoperability framework. Quite often, open source projects are duplicating efforts because there is no overall strategy, or agreements between projects, and since there is a limited supply of community members, they should be directed to maximize their impact.

So, to answer the questions in the post :

And so I’d like to get a read from the other members of the OMC, and from visitors that may not yet be participants (you can join by going to: http://open-management.com/join/) as to whether they: A) agree that such a taxonomy is needed and, B) will commit to using it to describe their projects, assuming that we establish in advance the rules for discussing and deciding what the taxonomy would be.

A : yes, the taxonomy is needed, but see my points above.

B: I cannot commit since I do not represent a member of the OMC, but this requirement is making a lot of sense.

I hope that the discussion on this taxonomy or functional map will be performed in an open forum, and I would happily contribute.