Func had an interesting beginning. It began not in a whiteboard-lined conference room, but in a small coffeeshop in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Greg DeKoenigsberg, Adrian Likins, Seth Vidal, and I were discussing how to make Linux easier to manage for large install bases. That’s when we came up with the idea for Func.
While Fedora contains excellent open source management applications for a variety of tasks, it still lacked a good remote scripting framework roughly analogous to the features provided by system-config-*applications. It turns out this was something many of us wanted to write for a long time–but for some reason, we never did. So, why not build it?

A fair amount of commercial management software seems to get built
and sold without consulting the people who end up using it–systems administrators. While these applications may present extremely well-crafted graphical user interfaces with enterprise-grade reliability and scalability features, they often lack solid scripting ability or require development using complex SOAP APIs to get things done.
For managing very large install bases, these aspects impose barriers to automation. System administrators tend to prefer things written in Perl, Python, or bash. Automation is critical.

The most commonly used remote management tool for Linux is probably
SSH. While being a very useful tool for manipulating a single machine
remotely, it is challenging to integrate with an environment where
machines are frequently reinstalled or where complex remote actions
need to be scripted. SSH wasn’t meant to be a multi-system remote
scripting tool, and it’s definitely not meant to be something you build
other applications on top of. Futhermore, integrating SSH key deployment with kickstart (even with tools like Cobbler to help) can be difficult.

On the other end of the management spectrum, there are configuration
management systems such as Puppet, cfengine, and bcfg2. These solutions are great for pushing configuration files around and describing the way infrastructure should look (or making it look that way), but are not as well-suited for remote scripting and one-off tasks.
We wanted to create a solution that filled this void–something absolutely simple, rapid to deploy, easy to use and easy to expand. This would become Func.

Furthermore, we wanted to challenge ourselves, so we decided to create the first release of Func in two weeks time. This was a goal we managed to exceed, as we had it submitted to Fedora in about eight days.

Func works by having a very minimalistic daemon (funcd) installed on each managed machine, which we call a “minion.” Each minion, when it is first run, receives SSL certificates from a remote “certmaster,” which can either be automatically signed or manually approved by an administrator. Client software (in the form of the command line tool (“func”) or the Client API) can then address specific minions from the central server (called the “overlord”), or even address a large set of them at once. Communication is currently only from the overlord to the minion, but intra-minion communication is coming.