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Mark Burgess
markburgess.org · Personal blog · on HN since 2013
Mark Burgess, a computer scientist and creator of CFEngine, writes about promise theory, distributed systems, configuration management and the CAP theorem.
What HN saysHN commenters cite his posts on CAP, promise theory and layer 2 tunnels, and one questions his CAP proof; promise theory is credited as the basis for CFEngine.
26HN people shared it
6linked it in comments
25stories submitted
97story points
11 months agolast shared
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Most-shared posts
- 1Deconstructing the CAP Theorem for CM and DevOps (2013)4 people · 39 points · first shared 2014 · 2 comments on HN
- 2The Cyborg Compulsion3 people · 26 points · first shared 2015 · 12 comments on HN
- 3Microservices, the future of society and all that3 people · 5 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 4Promise Theory2 people · 5 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
- 5On system rollback and totalised fields (2011) [pdf]2 people · 4 points · first shared 2014 · discussion on HN
- 6A Theory of Voluntary Cooperation2 people · 2 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 7Why I stopped caring about peer review, and learned to love the work2 people · 1 points · first shared 2014 · discussion on HN
- 8SDN: software defined networking or small distributed namespaces?1 people · 3 points · first shared 2015 · discussion on HN
- 9Mark Burgess Treatise on Systems1 people · 2 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 10From Observability to Significance in Distributed Information Systems [pdf]1 people · 2 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 11The Promises of DevOps1 people · 2 points · first shared 2014 · discussion on HN
- 12A short introduction to operating systems (2001)1 people · 2 points · first shared 2022 · discussion on HN
- 13Configuration Management for Continuous Delivery (part 1)1 people · 1 points · first shared 2014 · discussion on HN
- 1420 years of CFEngine: design promises1 people · 1 points · first shared 2013 · discussion on HN
- 15The Brain Horizon – At what point should an organism become a society?1 people · 1 points · first shared 2014 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
justincormack · 2015-01-23
There is an excellent post about why you dont want layer 2 tunnels here http://markburgess.org/blog_broadcast.html
atsaloli · 2014-12-11
Dr. Mark Burgess just blogged "Why I stopped caring about peer review, and learned to love the work". http://markburgess.org/blog_peer.html
hosh · 2025-06-09
There's an entire semi-formal language on promises, called promise theory. This includes promises autonomous agents (humans, back when this was conceived) make for other autonomous agents. Promise Theory was the basis for CFEngine, which spawned Puppet and Chef, but it's applicability is much broader. The kind of promises examined within this article can be described and analyzed by promise theory.
The central insight is understanding that promises are not obligations, and why and how that matters. From there, interesting things can be analyzed -- using types and contracts in a development team, unit tests, integration tests, specs, user interface and user experience, compliance, signaling, APIs, etc.
I think it is particularly useful now in the age of LLMs, agenic AIs, and autonomous robots that have to navigate spaces shared with humans.
https://markburgess.org/promises.html
shin_lao · 2015-10-18
The proof is questionable. Read here: http://markburgess.org/blog_cap.html
Dave_Rosenthal · 2014-06-19
Thanks to mjb for the good list. To it I'll add:
http://markburgess.org/blog_cap.html
I think I also might write one up myself.
vdm · 2014-03-12
Exactly. This is a deeper problem than commonly appreciated, and the cfengine author has written at length about that. http://markburgess.org/certainty.html