California, CA (Jul 17, 2015) - CFEngine, Inc., IT Automation pioneer and leader in infrastructure management software, today announced the general availability of its flagship product CFEngine Enterprise and CFEngine Community, version 3.7
Easier application deployment
The 3.7.0 release contains a brand new technology for application deployments. According to Marcin Pasinski, a new packages deployment mechanism has been developed in collaboration the CFEngine community and users. It is designed to be more reliable, simple and easy to use. The new technology co-exists and is compatible with the previous version of the packages promise type in CFEngine. This mean it will be fully backward-compatible, so any packages promises that you have from 3.6 or earlier versions should still work with 3.7.
Currently supported platforms for the new packages promise include those based on yum/rpm and apt/deb, but it can easily be extended by adding new package modules. Package modules are essentially wrappers for the package managers that implement the CFEngine package module protocol, Marcin Pasinski continues. This allows for a very modular and flexible approach, in line with the design principles of CFEngine.
Increased platform support
CFEngine 3.7 improves the support for RHEL 7 and CentOS 7. These platforms were already supported as agent platforms, but the rpm packages have now been unified so that there is a single agent RPM that works across all of these platform versions. These platforms can now run CFEngine Enterprise hubs as well. In addition, both Debian 7 and 8 have been added to the supported platform list; both as Enterprise hubs and agents. In general, systemd-enabled distributions are now fully supported.
Easier collaboration and knowledge sharing
A very popular feature of CFEngine Enterprise is the status dashboard. The dashboard allows its users to customize a single page tailored to his specific needs. Whether it be alerts of non-compliant behavior, inventory thresholds or the state of a roll-out, the dash board gives you exactly the information needed. The dashboard is as customizable as the CFEngine language itself, allowing for indefinite setups. With 3.7 we have made it easy for users to share their dashboard with others, according to Eystein Stenberg. This means teams can now quickly create theme-specific dashboards and share them. We think Security and Management dashboard are going to be two killers, he adds.
Any change done by CFEngine is now being tracked
At large scale systems, where there are thousands of servers, CFEngine typically conducts billions of compliance checks per day. This also means that in cases of contradictions, where CFEngine will repair a state every 5 minutes it runs, there will be thousands of similar changes made to the system. Due to compliance reasons, our customers wanted CFEngine to store every change done, regardless of the size. We have listened and have introduced Change Reporting in 3.7. A fully customizable reporting mechanism (for the ones afraid of full disks) are now available to Enteprise customers through the dashboard widget and reporting interface. The change reporting features also include a fully functional REST API, in addition to the user interface.
Network and security enhancements
In untrusted networks it is now easier to bootstrap securely with CFEngine. The CFEngine network protocol uses TLS by default to secure the connections. Which security protocol that is allowed on the server side can be defined by the user. To control which TLS version and ciphers used, new attributes have been added to the language. These addition allows for a more secure approach to configuration management in untrusted network.
For more information, please see: https://cfengine.com/company/blog-detail/cfengine-3-7-0-released-new-package-promise-and-change-reporting
ABOUT CFEngine
CFEngine, Inc., a pioneer in IT Automation at Web-scale, enables organizations to become more agile and thrive in the Cloud Era by radically simplifying, automating and transforming the way they build, deliver and consume IT infrastructure and applications. With CFEngine, some of the largest IT organizations provision resources and deploy new applications orders of magnitude faster, while ensuring continuous availability, security and compliance in large-scale, very dynamic and highly complex environments. CFEngine has users in more than 100 countries, including many of the world’s largest financial organizations such as JPMC, as well as companies like LinkedIn, Chevron, DirecTV, Locaweb, and Deutsche Telekom.
