CFEngine began in the early part of 1993. It was the first Open Source configuration management tool and quickly became an internationally used tool. Since then, CFEngine has been reinvented several times through our commitment to basic research, and today CFEngine is installed on over a million computers all over the world.
We have put a lot of work into CFEngine over the past two years to truly solve the challenges faced by system administrators throughout the industry. The arrival of alternative configuration management systems has drawn some attention from CFEngine, but the feedback we get from our users is: `We don’t talk a lot about CFEngine because it just works. We couldn’t run our business without it…’ So we want to shift the attention back at our loyal CFEngine users.
Today, there has never been a more exciting time to be using CFEngine. Major release 3, with its Free and Open Source Community Edition, and its enhanced commercial cousin CFEngine Nova, has once again set the bar for self-healing, reliable, convergent automation, and we want to help users to upgrade their older installations to the state of the art. So we are offering some of the fruits of our commercial development back to the community in four parts:
- A new release of the CFEngine 3.0.3 source code.
- A brand new, standardized upgrade guide for moving from CFEngine 2 to CFEngine 3. (Upgrade guide)
- The CFEngine Community Open Promise-Body Library initiative, to enable users to exchange and develop an industry-wide lingua franca of idioms for CFEngine coding. (CFEngine Community Open Promise-Body Library) (cfengine_stdlib.cf)
- A solutions guide that uses the standard body templates for solving key problems in system administration. (Solutions guide)
At CFEngine, our aim is not to take away your job by automation, but to enhance the experience of applying your engineering skills with exciting, cutting edge technology. We hope you enjoy our latest releases, and we wish everyone seasonal greetings from the CFEngine team.
