As we bid farewell to 2023, it’s once again time to reflect on the milestones and progress we’ve made throughout the year. This year is especially significant because it marks 30 years since CFEngine’s birth. From its humble beginnings at the University of Oslo to the thousands of implementations across the world and counting, CFEngine has not only weathered the twists and turns of life, but has thrived in an industry where many have come and gone.
It’s that time of year again where we reflect & recap all things new with CFEngine from this year. You may recall from the 2021 retrospective that our focus for 2022 would be on collaboration, ease of use, and community engagement. I’m proud to summarize our progress below in these key areas for 2022’s Retrospective and give you a sneak peek at what’s to come in 2023.
Revamped documentation CFEngine is a powerful, flexible, and complex piece of software, but we are committed to make it as easy to use as possible, and are looking at all ways we can improve the new user experience. The documentation is an important tool for both new and experienced users to find the information they need. We identified multiple areas for improvement in terms of structure, navigation, search, and content, we decided to completely overhaul it in 2022. The new documentation was launched this fall, and includes several new improvements:
Since joining the CFEngine team in 2019 I’ve heard and read numerous times that the configuration management market is dying and becoming obsolete. While I and many others don’t personally adopt this line of thinking, I can understand why one would come to this conclusion being that we’re in an ever-changing industry and talking about solutions that have been around for decades. Configuration management solutions like CFEngine are certainly not a new concept, however there are many changes that are happening across the industry that will continue to drive usage and will ultimately pave the way for a new era in this market.
For our final blog post of 2021 and continuing our tradition, we’d like to reflect on all the CFEngine accomplishments throughout the year and provide a sneak peak of what to expect in 2022.
Modernized Mission Portal UI In CFEngine Enterprise 3.18.0 LTS, released in June, we overhauled the web user interface. You can read about the changes in our blog post on the subject. We will continue to make meaningful design changes within Mission Portal next year with the goal of making it more intuitive and user friendly.
As an MSSP (Managed Security Service Provider), HIPAA Vault relies on CFEngine to automate & secure their infrastructure on behalf of their customers. HIPAA Vault has been a longtime CFEngine Community user since 2012 and recently upgraded to Enterprise in order to boost their infrastructure visibility through Mission Portal and features like Compliance Reporting that help them provide a more secure & compliant cloud hosting solution.
We chose CFEngine over others because it is the most trusted and reliable solution in the market. We are more interested in dependability than having the new shiny tool that just hit the market. says Gil Vidals, Founder & CEO of HIPAA Vault
New CFEngine Website Today we’re excited to announce the release of our new website. This has been several months in the making and just one of many big announcement we have planned for 2021. Our goal in redesigning the website is simply to enhance your experience when visiting.
Whether you’re an IT Manager evaluating our Enterprise feature set, a Systems Administrator interested in trying CFEngine for the first time or a long time community member, we hope our new website helps you find exactly what you’re looking for quickly and easily.
It’s no secret that COVID-19 is negatively impacting businesses of all sizes in a number of ways. Some more obvious than others. Unless you are in IT, you’re probably not thinking of how COVID-19 can affect the infrastructure security of your organization, but the truth is that as businesses make the tough decision to layoff employees in order to stay in business, basic security hygiene can easily be overlooked. Even organizations that are fortunate enough to not have to make cuts are still impacted in the form of needing access to specialized tools that allow IT & Security teams to enforce infrastructure changes remotely, efficiently, and at scale. If you’re looking to implement a configuration management tool to improve infrastructure security, such as CFEngine, it can be a little overwhelming to understand what types of questions to ask and criteria to consider. To help you brainstorm and prioritize, I’d like to cover what I believe are the top 3 most important criteria to consider during your evaluation.