After 4 years of "experience in the trenches" providing enterprise configuration management solutions based on CFEngine 3, it became clear that our customers wanted CFEngine's speed, small footprint, and features but were having a hard time with the language and tooling, and needed an easier way.
The goal of ncf is to abstract the knowledge of "how" to achieve tasks in CFEngine, and expose these capabilities for non-expert users. Thus, you can express your intent in a very succinct and expressive manner, integrating simply with CFEngine and its power, while keeping everything "under the hood" tunable.
ncf promotes DRY-ness and sharing knowledge. It is built from the ground-up to be easy to learn, flexible and extensible. The framework is written in pure CFEngine language, introducing a well-structured design built on multiple decoupled layers with clearly-defined interfaces and roles.
In our presentation we will introduce ncf and explain how ncf can be used to solve real-world examples, explain our design choices, the architectural approach taken, and demo the new magic at our finger tips to build CFEngine solutions that are extensible and easier to work with.
Speakers: Jonathan Clarke