With another year behind us, we take a look back at what happened with CFEngine in 2024.
Webinars: ‘The agent is in’
We are 3 years in to our webinar series, ‘The agent is in’, and the show had, as expected, 12 new episodes. You can find all the recordings, and the registration link, at cfengine.com/webinars. Additional show notes are also available on our blog.
Module Mondays and Feature Fridays
Nick and Craig have been writing regularly throughout the year about their favorite features and modules. You can find these posts on our blog:
New feature: Audit log
The new audit log feature helps security and compliance teams review who made changes, what the changes were, and when they were performed:
The audit log will arrive in a supported release by the end of 2025 with CFEngine 3.27 LTS.
Notable changes in behavior
Occasionally, we have to make changes to CFEngine which might impact existing users relying on the current behavior. Most commonly, we do this, when the current behavior contradicts what is documented, what users expect, and/or if it has negative security implications to keep it this way. When we do this, and we see that users might be relying on the old behavior (i.e. it’s not a simple bugfix which improves the situation for everyone without any manual changes). The line between bug fix and change in behavior is sometimes blurry, but we try our best to communicate these kinds of changes very clearly, through change-in-behavior blog posts, as well as warning log messages when appropriate. In 2024, there were 3 such cases:
- The arglist attribute now preserves spaces
depth_searchcan now be used (but warns) with an individual file as source- CFEngine roles inventory attribute
Feature release: 3.24.0 LTS
In July, we released CFEngine 3.24.0 LTS. Being an LTS release, 3.24 brought previously released features such as host groups and group data into a supported release;
Patch releases
Multiple patches have been released throughout 2024 for the LTS versions:
- In January, 3.18.7 and 3.21.4 were released.
- In June, 3.18.8 and 3.21.5 were released.
- In December, 3.21.6 and 3.24.1 were released.
We encourage all of our users to stay up to date with the latest patch releases, to benefit from bug fixes, security patches, and dependency updates. Please note that the 3.18.x LTS series is no longer supported, and the 3.21.x series is approaching end of life (December 2025). If you need assistance upgrading to one of our supported versions, or you would like to purchase extended support, please contact us. For more information on previous and future ’end of support’ dates, please visit here.
What’s next?
Next winter, by the end of 2025, we will launch CFEngine 3.27 LTS, bringing new functionality, including the audit log, to a stable, supported LTS release. If you’re interested in what we’re focusing on for CFEngine now, and going forward, it can be summarized by these three areas:
- Modern infrastructures - Cloud, hybrid cloud, container, and Kubernetes-based environments.
- Security and compliance - Recently we added audit logs, and before that, 2FA, a lynis security hardening module, and compliance reports.
- Overall quality improvements - UI/UX, ease of use, scalability, performance, bandwidth.
