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.
Resource efficiency takes on a new importance as users increasingly work in the Cloud where every CPU cycle is billed. The CFEngine mantra of “Lightweight! Lightweight! Lightweight!” has pushed the new release even further in the direction of resource efficiency. Considerable improvements in network efficiency have also been achieved, allowing reporting of many thousands of hosts every 5 minutes to a single hub aggregator - far in advance of other solutions.
Some of the changes in CFEngine 3 Nova include:
- An improved Ajax-based Web UI Mission Portal with LDAP/AD integration of login with roles
- Improved reporting on all aspects of policy and host compliance. Flexible searching of reports in a brand new new scalable interface supports thousands of hosts on a single hub.
- Ability to add manual notes to the CFDB.
- An improved Web-based policy editor in the Mission Portal for smart editing of subversion repositories.
- Support for multiple host staging environments, such as Test, QA, and Production etc. Users can monitor the compliance of multiple stages of policy development in the Mission Portal to measure the effect of changes before committing to production.
- Improved integration of policy with subversion repositories. Users can modify, update and approve revisions for the different staged environments.
- Command line export of Mission Portal reports, allowing system administrators to search the database in the command line, using familar Unix tools to query and filter data.
- An improved PHP API to the CFDB now gives generic JSON return values so that users can customize the open interface and JQuery framework of the Mission Portal should they wish to do so.
- CFEngine’s unique Knowledge Map technology has been improved too to index and unify policy, documentation and code examples, as well bringing a bank of concepts about configuration management to the attention of users.
- Enterprise grade support for Mission Critical High Availability in the CFEngine control circuit. (see https://cfengine.com/blog/mission-critical)
- Improved machine learning and anomaly monitoring for diagnostics and capacity planning. Additional sensors added to detect operating system performance and behavioural trends have been added, especially on Linux kernels.
- Orchestration of processes involving several machines, especially useful in cluster and job processing environments.
- Improved hypervisor integration. CFEngine’s support for XEN/KVM virtual machine creation, on the fly, using the industry standard libvirt has been improved by stripping down this library.
- Improved diagnostic capabilities when deploying CFEngine now allow users to debug deployment problems faster and more easily.
- Elimination of MySQL dependences in the software. CFEngine 3 Nova now uses the NoSQL document oriented database MongoDB for all storage on its Mission Portal, providing rapid and efficient update and retrieval, as well as reducing the dependencies of the software even further.
- CFEngine standard self-management policies have been modified to improve the separation between upgrades, CFEngine management and site policy.
We wish all our users a stellar experience with Nova.
