Mahesh Kumar, VP Marketing CFEngine
@mahesh_CFE
mahesh.kumar@cfengine.com
Hello Everyone! It is not too often that one gets to join a company with solid fundamentals when it comes to technology and one that finds itself as the change leader in an area that is evolving real-time (DevOps and Continuous Delivery). Well, I am thrilled to report that I am onboard here at CFEngine as their VP of Marketing.
In the days ahead I will be reporting back frequently on the cool things we are doing here at CFEngine.
A while ago, work was started on a new promise type in CFEngine, the “users” promise type. What it does is make promises about which users are supposed to be present on each host, what login credentials they have, what groups they are part of, and so on. This has traditionally been something one would have to write in the CFEngine policy using system commands, but with this new feature it becomes a much more convenient and robust solution for users management.
Some software is more opinionated than others. If it ever made sense to anthropomorphize software, the CFEngine agent would be a good candidate. A CFEngine installation is a society of independent agents, each with their own goals, schedules and limited view of the world, individually doing their best under current weather.
Mark Burgess’ new book ‘In Search of Certainty’ may be viewed as a popular anthology for the design considerations that went into writing CFEngine.
Authored by Remi Bergsma - http://blog.remibergsma.com
Back in June, just before I went off for holiday, I attended a CFEngine training in Amsterdam. When I returned from holiday a few weeks later, me and my team started making plans to implement CFEngine in our environment. After two months of hard work, I’m proud to say we manage about 350 out of our 400 Linux servers with CFEngine!
The ride has been fun, although not always easy.
CFEngine 3.5.2 is now available for download. This is a maintenance release of CFEngine 3.5, and introduces a number of fixes and improvements to both Community and Enterprise editions. New functionality has been included to the SQL builder and the Design Center integration in Mission Portal.
Changes in CFEngine Enterprise:
MongoDB has been upgraded to version 2.2.4 monitoring data has moved into a separate database - see db-move-monitoring-to-cfmonitor.js script to migrate data Improvements to the Mission Portal:
CFEngine 3.5.1 is now available for download. This is the first maintenance release of CFEngine 3.5, and introduces a number of fixes and improvements to both Community and Enterprise editions. New functionality has been included to the SQL builder and the Design Center integration in Mission Portal.
Community repositories will be updated shortly.
Core Changes:
the CFEngine Standard Library in masterfiles/libraries is now split into promise-type specific policy files, and lives in a version-specific directory.
After work and discussion, the CFEngine developer team produced https://github.com/cfengine/core/pull/784 to make libraries/cfengine_stdlib.cf compatible with 3.4.x and older again, to modularize it, and to improve the upgrade experience. These changes will be in the upcoming CFEngine 3.5.1 release:
libraries/cfengine_stdlib.cf is now 3.4-compatible again, so upgrading will not break existing CFEngine installations. lib/3.5 and lib/3.6 contain the standard library with changes that require 3.5.x and 3.6.x, respectively lib/3.5 and lib/3.6 have multiple files instead of a single cfengine_stdlib.
CFEngine 3.5.0 Community Edition is now available for download!
At the same time we have updated the CFEngine documentation, which now lives in a new design and information architecture at http://docs.cfengine.com.
This latest release of CFEngine Community comes with a ton of improvements and new language features for policy writers. Many of these changes have been motivated by the great feedback and reports from our users, and a lot of changes were contributed by members of the growing CFEngine community.
The Release Candidate of CFEngine 3.5.0 Community Edition is now available for download at:
https://cfengine.com/inside/myspace
We’re looking forward to your feedback to the changes and improvements!
Significantly improved parsing and evaluation of policies A large number of parser and evaluation problems have been fixed. Iterating over arrays with nested lists has caused many headaches and workarounds in previous versions of CFEngine. With 3.5, many of those can disappear.
Policy developers get clear and consistent messages from the stricter parser.
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.
The change to CFEngine means you can seamlessly use PowerShell in your configuration policies, just like the normal “cmd” shell. It’s very easy, for example, say you have the following bundle:
bundle agent mybundle { vars: "mymessage" string => execresult("echo This is a message from cmd", "useshell"); reports: "$(mymessage)"; } This uses the regular “cmd” shell.
