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By Phillip Moore Date: Wednesday, 23 June 2010 14:00 Duration: 40 minutes Target audience: Intermediate Language: English Tags: applications change cloud computing control enterprise perl5 |
Introducing EFS: Software Distribution and Change Control for Distributed Environments
You can find more information on the speaker's site:
- Talk: http://www.openefs.org
Software development is a fairly mature topic in the 21st century, but software deployment is still a black art. In order to achieve scalability in large environment, most administrators eventually attempt to centrally manage software deployment on distributed filesystems, but in a heterogeneous environment, this proves to be very difficult to scale, and maintain stability.
EFS is a software product that manages the global distribution of arbitrary versions of software in a large enterprise. With support for separate development and productions environments EFS has functionality that implements true change control. EFS provides a highly scalable versionized namespace, that allows multiple versions of the same software product to co-exist. It includes support for tracking dependencies between releases, which releases are development, production, or deprecated.
EFS itself is implemented entirely in perl, and uses a wide variety of open source software (OpenSSL, OpenSSH, MySQL). EFS was not designed in a vacuum. It is an open source implementation of the core of the Aurora UNIX environment implemented at Morgan Stanley in the 1990s. Over the years, numerous presentations about the Aurora concept have been given publicly, but the core Aurora software (AFS/VMS) remained proprietary. Now, this functionality has been brought the open source community, and we (the EFS team) are convinced we have a product that change the way software is managed in large environments.
