Warning this is a rant.
Does anyone else the general feeling that both convergence and idempotence as strong features in most configuration management products (Chef, CFEngine, etc.) being a giant weakness in the JAMF suite of products at the moment?
For those who don't know, convergence is the idea that you say something should be a specific state (let's say Flash Player a specific version), and the configuration management system then tries to get a system to that state.
So in the Flash Player example, a Mac might test to see what version is installed and then restore the Mac to that state by re-installing Flash Player, upgrading, etc.
Idempotence is the important concept (in this context) that doing something multiple times doesn't yield side effects. This is to say that in the process of converging back to a known state a Mac won't do something as a side effect on multiple runs.
I've managed Casper for several years, and my fear at the moment is that we've all come up with solutions using many different tools (smart groups, policies, scripts, etc.), but these other configuration management systems have been done at such a large scale that those communities have an agreed upon language that is typically easy to version control and test.
We've all seen JAMF administrators get great things done with their own scripts, but there's a lot of re-inventing the wheel going on. I'll probably end up with the cfengine for configuration management with Casper for MDM, VPP, Self-service. But I'm curious if anyone things JAMF is going to head into a direction that more fully embraces the general configuration management wave of DevOps in the industry right now.
Casper as a thing over ARD was a huge leap, but the core product paradigms feel a decade old at this point.
END RANT
