CFEngine blog

The CFEngine Test Suites

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 22:28:00 +0200

When developing a large and flexible software system like CFEngine, it is an unfortunate truth that developers do not always get everything right at the first attempt. The source code is also changing frequently due to new features, optimizations and bug-fixes. As you can see from the Ohloh online statistics, thousands of lines are added and removed every week.

CFEngine 3.3.0 Release Notes

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 22:23:00 +0200

The CFEngine Community 3.3.0 release is here, with the largest set of changes to date! We have open-sourced nice features from the commercial edition, and introduced service-promises for Unix. Some potential "gotcha" issues have been fixed, to streamline and simplify the use of CFEngine. The embedded database code has been significantly refactored, optimized and made much more robust. A large number of useful variables, classes and functions have been introduced. And as usual, a set of bugs have been fixed...

Ten Reasons for 5-minute configuration update and repair

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 20:48:00 +0100

How often should your configuration management system verify the integrity of your system? The default choices we've made by CFEngine are the results of almost 20 years of research into this area. Below you will find ten issues and references that explain why these choices are underpinned by the science. These ten things really all amount to the same thing: if you are playing ping-pong against the adversary of change, you need to be as quick on your feet as your opponent -- and faster.

Third Wave of IT Engineering
SysAdmin 3.0
Nova
IT Configuration Management
configuration management
CFEngine 3 Community
CFEngine 3

CFEngine is now on GitHub

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 19:48:00 +0100

We are extremely happy to announce that the source code for CFEngine Community is now hosted on GitHub, one of the largest code-hosting services in the world. This move has many important advantages

CFEngine 3 Community
CFEngine 3
github

NEW! CFEngine 3 Nova Evaluation Program

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 17:51:00 +0100

CFEngine is happy to see increased demand for our software, both the Open Source version, CFEngine Community, and the Enterprise Software version, CFEngine 3 Nova. We recently moved the CFEngine Community source code to GitHub and plan to use that platform to interact more closely with the general community (watch this space for hot topics to come!).

SysAdmin 3.0
Nova
Mission Portal
configuration management
CFEngine 3 Community
CFEngine 3

Meet the CFEngine Team - Diego Zamboni

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 15:43:00 +0100

Hello - my name is Diego Zamboni, and I am very happy to have this opportunity to introduce myself. If you read the CFEngine forums, you have probably seen me around, but it's nice to be able to step away from official business for a moment and just tell you about myself.

IT Configuration Management
configuration management
CFEngine 3 Community
CFEngine 3

REST API for Nova

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 20:37:00 +0100

One feature our customers have requested for the next version of CFEngine Nova (available before summer 2012) is having the ability to collect reported data through a REST API. It is already possible to get at reporting data through the Mission Portal web-interface, as well as the command-line client cf-report. However...

system administration
REST API
IT Configuration Management
Nova
CFEngine 3

Meet the CFEngine Team - Eystein Måløy Stenberg

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 22:17:00 +0100

Hello, my name is Eystein Måløy Stenberg, and I have been working for CFEngine since the company was founded back in 2008. You have probably seen me post on the forum, and on the company blog from time-to-time, but I thought it was time for a proper introduction.

CFEngine 3
Nova
Mission Portal
configuration management

What makes clouds float and developers operative? Agility!

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 15:11:00 +0100

In IT, the challenge of the environment is the jungle of changing demand, business imperatives, and the striving for competitive fitness in a cut-throat marketplace; it is network requests to servers, spanning a landscape of different operating systems and their curiosities; it is a backlog of security patches and bug-fixes that need to be navigated, without losing balance. Superficially, this is quite different from the primate jungle, but mastering this other world is still about having sufficient speed and dexterity.

Third Wave of IT Engineering
Agility

CFEngine @ USENIX LISA 2011

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 01:00:00 +0100

The LISA conference, run by the USENIX organization [www.usenix.org], is the largest conference specifically for system administration today. It has been 25 years in the running, and has been a cultural and professional centre for the field of the system administration for most of that time. LISA is a unique haven for practitioners in the field, but it was also the place where modern theory emerged, driven largely by the efforts of a small group of individuals known as the ABC of system administration: Anderson, Burgess, Couch. CFEngine Founder Mark Burgess has been attending LISA since 1997.

Third Wave of IT Engineering
SysAdmin 3.0
Project Constellation
Nova
LISA
configuration management
CFEngine 3 Community
CFEngine 3
android

Now in Beta: New CFEngine 3 Policy Wizard

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 21:28:00 +0100

At Tuesday night's CFEngine Meet-the-Team BoF session at LISA, Joe Netzel, one of CFEngine's talented Systems Engineers, showed off a small app that he has been building in his spare time to help new users become more comfortable developing their own CFEngine policies.

LISA
community
CFEngine 3

A Preview of 'Project Constellation': The Network of Stars

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 03:49:00 +0100

Eystein Måløy Stenberg provides a sneak-peek into “Project Constellation”, new CFEngine Nova technology under development that will expand the universe of configuration management by integrating network, server and mobile management, as well as support both geographic diversity and massive scale.

Project Constellation
Nova
LISA
CFEngine 3
Third Wave of IT Engineering

New Book: CFEngine 3 Beginner's Guide

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 12:00:00 +0100

Packt Publishing has just come out with a new title, "The CFEngine 3 Beginner's Guide". In this guest blog, the book's author gives an overview of the subject, his motivations, and its intended audience. The publisher kindly offers readers access to a free e-chapter and a discount for purchasing the book.

CFEngine 3
LISA
books

CFEngine, SysAdmin 3.0 and the Third Wave of IT Engineering

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 14:00:00 +0100

The Third Wave of human society is an age where knowledge and information drive prosperity. Parallel to the changes that pushed humanity through major industrialization in manufacturing are developments happening in IT management today, some thirty years behind the manufacturing industry. CFEngine and its users have been a primus motor for these changes -- helping to transform old techniques into a knowledge-based approach to IT -- and we are celebrating this new chapter with the announcement of CFEngines Nova and Constellation.

Third Wave of IT Engineering
SysAdmin 3.0
configuration management

CFEngine - The Third Wave of Configuration Management

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 17:30:00 +0100

If you have been anywhere near a Unix system in the past ten years, you will almost certainly have heard of CFEngine and its 'revolutionary, self-healing approach' to datacentre automation. However, what you might not know is that its current third incarnation CFEngine 3 is both younger and more advanced than most of its imitators, harnessing the very latest ideas about system management -- and the difference is all about knowledge.

configuration management

What's new in CFEngine 3 Nova?

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 09:00:00 +0200

Today CFEngine releases the latest version of its commercial enterprise software for configuration management and IT operations.
In addition to all the usual power of scalable and convergent system configuration, Cfengine 3 Nova brings a higher level of information awareness to system administrators at very low cost.

release
Nova

Untethered, CFEngine hitches a lift on Android

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 17:27:00 +0200

Like most successful post-war technologies, the IT innovations that flourish today are those that bring freedom (in the broadest sense) to individuals. From the Italian scooter, to the American refrigerator, or the latest ability to communicate through an almost endless variety of interfaces and models, it is the desire to be set free that drives the commerce of technology.

phone
android

Your education is not wasted at CFEngine

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 15:52:00 +0200

It is always a surprise to me how many people leave college with the feeling that they learned nothing useful during their time there -- with the attitude that theoretical learning and historical context (what distinguishes a college education from a mere training course) bear no relevance to the "real world". This, of course, is nonsense.

CFEngine releases community edition 3.2.0

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 01:24:00 +0200

As the summer draws to a close, CFEngine's core development team has been wrapping up some intense development to bring you version 3.2.0 of the CFE Community Edition.

release
configuration management
community
centrally managed network
bundled policy
bootstrap

Mission Critical IT - can you afford it?

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 01:24:00 +0200

CFEngine is an inexpensive life-support system for complex and mission critical IT infrastructure...

Every year the world spends billions on risk avoidance -- safety and backup equipment, security systems and even insurance policies against loss and liability. For many of us, the risk of serious loss is quite small (though still sufficient to keep insurance companies in business) but in some industries the consequences of loss are so serious that even a small risk is unacceptable.

configuration management

Test Driven System Administration

Thu, 03 Feb 2011 15:08:00 +0100

CFEngine has been at the forefront of innovation in Configuration Management since the start of the 1990s, and Cfengine's CTO and Founder Mark Burgess has been writing a lot about the history of those ideas as well as the vision of configuration management going forward

Loosening Orion's Belt -- Cfengine's Orion Cloud Pack

Tue, 21 Dec 2010 11:18:00 +0100

Cfengine's Orion Cloud Pack was originally conceived to make the use of the EC2 Cloud simple for users of CFEngine (see the demo), but the techniques that make Cloud Computing simple are not at all limited to that. With powerful configuration management, it really doesn't matter where you do your computing.

The Orion Cloud
Nova

Facebook 'likes' Cfengine!

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 12:18:00 +0200

CFEngine has played a major role in allowing Facebook to scale from one dormroom server to the largest datacenters of the world. Tom Cook explained it all with high velocity.

CFEngine in your phone

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 12:18:00 +0200

GNU/Linux is taking over the embedded device market, bringing Open Source flexibility and superior Unix management techniques to distributed, partially connected, and nomadic environments. Associate Professor Erik Hjelmås of Gjøvik University College in Norway has been experimenting with the latest CFEngine on a Nokia N900 mobile phone.

phone
nokia

CFEngine and Ubuntu go back to University

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 12:18:00 +0200

Users at Oslo University will soon be offered the Ubuntu operating system on their laptops and desktop machines, and it will come with fully automated CFEngine management.