Windows PowerShell support
by Kristian Amlie - May 24, 2013
Recently support for Windows PowerShell was merged into the Enterprise Windows version of CFEngine. PowerShell is Microsoft's enhanced shell, intended for more advanced system administration and programming tasks.
Behind the scenes: How do we test CFEngine
by Carlos Duclos - May 16, 2013
Over the last year we have changed the way we test our software from a manual process to a highly automated process. This new system is capable of taking a change from our source code repository and follow it all the way up to where we update our internal staging servers, thus giving us incredibly valuable information while keeping manual intervention to a minimum.
IT-Organizations Face Disruption - Automation to the Rescue
by Thomas Ryd - May 09, 2013
IT-organizations around the world face constant pressure to do more, do it faster and with fewer resources. They are seen as cost centers and as such benchmarked against the performance of nimbler competitors and the public cloud providers.
IT-organizations feel that pressure from multiple sources at the same time. The CFO compares his internal IT-budgets with the costs of public cloud offerings and demands comparable savings. The lines of business know they can get the latest applications and platforms within minutes in the public cloud and complain about the slowness of their internal IT department. And the end-users expect continuous availability of all IT-services. Add Moore's law to describe the growth in scale and complexity of the IT infrastructure, and it becomes understandable why CIOs have the shortest tenure of all C-level executives.
A Case Study in CFEngine Layout
by Brian Bennet - April 15, 2013
I've been working a lot with CFEngine newbies. CFEngine has been described as flour, eggs, milk and butter. All the ingredients needed to make a cake. Getting the new CFEngine user to recognize, then become excited about the possibilities that CFEngine provides they are now faced with the question of "What next?"
Indeed, anybody can throw some flour, eggs, milk and butter into a bowl, mix and bake it. But will it taste good?
This is an exposé of how I have managed my CFEngine repository for more than eight years. This design was used to manage over 1,000 host instances.
This works best if you have an agile infrastructure. Use SmartOS, OpenStack, Amazon EC2 (Disclosure: I work for Amazon), CloudStack or similar.
March 2013 snapshot of CFEngine - get it while it's hot!
by Carlos Duclos - March 25, 2013
The March snapshot release of CFEngine Community and Enterprise has just hit our webservers. The releases are called 3.5 Beta1 and 3.1 Beta1, respectively, and just as last month: this is work in progress.