CFEngine Blog

The CFEngine team posts here about upcoming releases, new exciting features and thoughts about configuration management software, configuration management best practices and their own experiences.

Libutils: our friendly toolbox

by Carlos Duclos - February 15, 2013

For those of you following our development, you might have noticed that after our code split there is a new friend in town: libutils.

The aim of libutils is to be a toolbox of commonly used data structures, algorithms and other handy stuff. Historically we had several implementations of some data structures all over our code, so we decided it was time to start putting all together and make sure we always used the same structures.

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Validating partial and runnable policy

by Sigurd Teigen - February 14, 2013

Over the past week in CFEngine core dev, some results of refactoring work have come to fruition. We want to make cf-promises a flexible tool for analyzing policy code. Previously, cf-promises required a runnable policy, i.e. a policy that includes a body common control. This made it impractical to use for other policy files than the main file (typically promises.cf), as well as for policy still in development. We want to make it easier for people to use cf-promises while they are developing policy, and to enable the community to integrate with the tool.

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Why automation leads to greatly reduced IT-costs

by Thomas Ryd - February 07, 2013

At CFEngine we frequently meet companies that save millions of dollars annually as result of working with our tools.

In addition to improved productivity and increased quality of service, automation will make your IT-operations more cost effective. Actually, in order to stay competitive, I would argue that highly automated IT-operations is the only way for IT-organizations to meet the agility and cost requirements of today.

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Back from FOSDEM 2013 - Impressions

by Volker Hilsheimer - February 05, 2013

Software Defined Infrastructure becomes the new reality, and we need to make the tools that we have enjoyed for years in software engineering also available to the infrastructure engineers: debugging and linting configuration policies; automated testing of infrastructure code on a unit, system and acceptance level; integration with source control and continuous integration. And lastly, measuring everything we can, and analyzing the data in the context of the model of our system, and of our business goals.

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January 2013 Release now Available

by Volker Hilsheimer - January 30, 2013

Today we released our first monthly release! The January edition of CFEngine Enterprise and Community is now available to those who want to see what we are currently working on. The releases are called 3.1 alpha1 and 3.5 alpha1, respectively - and as the name suggests, this is work in progress.

Most things are not finished, somethings might not work. They are not designed for production environments, but we hope that some of you are curious enough about the contents of the packages to give them a go in a test environment, and tell us what you think!

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