As the summer draws to a close, CFEngine’s core development team has been wrapping up some intense development to bring you version 3.2.0 of the CFE Community Edition. This release includes some major improvements to community users, and forms the foundation for our upcoming commercial release. See the blog post http://www.blogcompiler.com/2011/08/29/cfengine-3-2-0-extended-change-log/ for a technical summary.
We believe that CFEngine 3.2.0 is now the easiest and most scalable configuration management system to get running in multiplatform environments (Linux, Solaris, AIX, HPUX). Starting with the new bundled policy, just a single command on each host will bootstrap hosts together in a simple classical centrally managed star network, whether in the cloud or on bare metal.
“Got no strings to hold things up”
CFEngine maintains desired state even when network resources are scarce or unavailable, so it is ideal for mobile devices as well as fixed infrastructure. No client in the network depends on a central server to prop it up – all clients can operate with no strings attached. This makes CFEngine the fastest and least resource consuming solution for configuration management by far, with the fewest dependencies. Cloud deployments work out cheaper, and network bandwidth is not clogged by irrelevant overhead.
CFEngine is no mere deployment tool either – it remains the only compelete solution for continuous monitoring and repair, including security verification and compliance engineering. A CFEngine policy server can scale to several thousand machines, even when running five minute policy verifications – thriving when other software would choke.
Version 3.2.0 has improved the scalability of CFEngine’s technology even further, making a solid and super-lightweight for our commercial releases – which can now be upgraded automatically, making 3.2.0 a powerful tool for the server room, mobile systems or the cloud.
Watch out for CFEngine Nova 2.1, building on 3.2.0 for all Unix, Mac and Windows systems.
