In the past 2 and half months, we have refreshed the visual design of the CFEngine Mission Portal. You might already notice some differences in the navigation, iconography, and color set. This is a post to guide you through the major changes we made and also provide you an inside perspective into the design direction we are taking going forward.
As part of the UX/UI design team, our goal is to provide an up-to-date design as well as an easy-to-use user interface.
We are pleased to announce two new patch releases for CFEngine, version 3.12.7 and 3.15.4! These releases mainly contain bug fixes and dependency updates.
Changelogs As always, you can see a full list of changes and improvements in our changelogs:
3.12.7 Changelog for CFEngine Community 3.12.7 Changelog for CFEngine Enterprise 3.12.7 Changelog for Masterfiles Policy Framework 3.15.4 Changelog for CFEngine Community 3.
As we’ve hinted at before, 2021 will be a big year for CFEngine. In the summer, we will release CFEngine 3.18 LTS. This is the first LTS release with Compliance Reports , Custom Promise types , and all of the other improvements we’ve made over the past year .
Collaboration In addition to implementing valuable functionality for our users, we are focusing on better ways of interacting with them, and more opportunities for contribution, collaboration and sharing.
If you are debugging issues with a host, it is quite common to want to make changes to CFEngine policy, and speed up the process of fetching, evaluating and reporting for that host. You can do this by running cf-runagent and cf-hub from the command line, now we’ve brought this functionality into Mission Portal:
You can see the feature in action, here:
This feature will be part of CFEngine Enterprise 3.
I have a setup at home where I keep a local git server running on a Raspberry Pi 3 which contains personal/work journal, dotfiles and a personal policy repository. It was set up manually so before adding a new git repository for a family password store I set about retrofiting the configuration in CFEngine. The goal in this blog is to ensure that what I have already is managed by CFEngine and that what I want to add, /srv/git/passwords.
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.
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.
Generally speaking, CFEngine and Ansible can be used to solve the same problems, but their approaches are different. In this blog post I’d like to discuss the different approaches, their consequences, some advantages of each tool, and even using them together.
CFEngines autonomous agents CFEngine works by installing and running an agent on every host of your infrastructure. It is distributed, each CFEngine agent will evaluate its policy periodically and independently.
cf-remote is a tool for downloading and installing/deploying CFEngine. It automates a lot of the things you have to do before CFEngine is actually installed on your infrastructure, such as provisioning cloud instances, downloading CFEngine installers, copying them to remote hosts and installing / bootstrapping. To make it as easy as possible to get started with cf-remote and CFEngine, it is now available on pypi .
Getting started Installing cf-remote is as easy as:
We are excited to announce that CFEngine is now using GitHub Discussions . GitHub Discussions is a feature of GitHub repos, and similar to Q&A platforms like Stack Overflow, and other online forums. After testing it out for a few weeks we are pleased with how it works and want to encourage all our users to try it. We hope this fuels more discussion and sharing among CFEngine users - it is easy to discover on GitHub, many of you already have GitHub users, the UI is nice, and so the barrier to entry should be very low.
